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London River 



The first printing of this book 
consists of twenty-one hundred 
copies of which two thousand 
are for sale. This is numheT/^ffS. 




DNBON 



RVER 



H M 

TOMLINSON 



ALFRED .A KNOPF 

NEW TORK MCAVXXI 



m0ta^0^tm0^ 



ig rf ^ig 






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9m0mm0mm0mm0mm0m 




COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY 
ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc. 






.^OV 25 1921 
^ri A630407 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



■>-^^ 



TO 

MY MOTHER 

AND TO THE MEMORY OF 

MY FATHER 



Contents 



I The Foreshore, ii 

II A Midnight Voyage, 33 

III A Shipping Parish, 45 

IV The ''Heart's Desire," 75 
V The Master, 95 

VI The Ship-Runners, 105 

VII Not in the Almanac, 151 

VIII The Illusion, 161 

IX In a Coffee-Shop, 173 

X Off-Shore, 187 

XI An Old Lloyd's Register, 241 



I. The Foreshore 



L The Foreshore 

IT begins on the north side of the City, at 
Poverty Corner. It begins impercep- 
tibly, and very likely is no more than 
what a native knows is there. It does not 
look like a foreshore. It looks like another of 
the byways of the capital. There is nothing 
to distinguish it from the rest of Fenchurch 
Street. You will not find it in the Directory, 
for its name is only a familiar bearing used by 
seamen among themselves. If a wayfarer 
came upon it from the west, he might stop to 
light a pipe (as well there as anywhere) and 
pass on, guessing nothing of what it is and of 
its memories. And why should he? Lon- 
don is built of such old shadows ; and while we 
are here casting our own there is not much 
time to turn and question what they fall upon. 
Yet if some unreasonable doubt, a suspicion 
that he was being watched, made a stranger 
hesitate at that corner, he might begin to feel 
that London there was as different from Bays- 
water and Clapham as though deep water in- 
tervened. In a sense deep water does; and 



London River 

not only the sea, but legends of ships that have 
gone, and of the men who knew them, and 
traditions of a service older than anything 
Whitehall knows, though still as lively as en- 
terprise itself, and as recent as the ships which 
moved on today's high water. 

In a frame outside one of its shops hangs a 
photograph of a sailing ship. The portrait 
is so large and the beauty of the subject so evi- 
dent that it might have been the cause of the 
stranger stopping there to fill his pipe. Yet 
how could he know that to those groups of 
men loitering about the name of that ship is 
as familiar as Suez or Rio, even though they 
have never seen her? They know her as well 
as they know their business. They know her 
house-flag — it is indistinguishable in the pic- 
ture — and her master, and it is possible the 
oldest of them remembers the clippers of that 
fleet of which she alone now carries the em- 
blem; for this is not only another year, but 
another era. But they do not look at her 
portrait. They spit into the road, or stare 
across it, and rarely move from where they 
stand, except to pace up and down as though 
keeping a watch. At one time, perhaps thirty 
years ago, it was usual to see gold rings in their 
ears. It is said that if you wanted a bunch of 

[12] 



The Foreshore 

men to run a little river steamer, with a free- 
board of six inches, out to Delagoa Bay, you 
could engage them all at this corner, or at 
the taverns just up the turning. The sugges- 
tion of such a voyage, in such a ship, would 
turn us to look on these men in wonder, for it 
is the way of all but the wise to expect appear- 
ance to betray admirable qualities. These 
fellows, though, are not significant, except 
that you might think of some of them that 
their ease and indifference were assumed, and 
that, when trying not to look so, they were very 
conscious of the haste and importance of this 
great city into which that corner jutted far 
enough for them. They have just landed, or 
they are about to sail again, and they might 
be standing on the shore eyeing the town be- 
yond, in which the luck of ships is cast by 
strangers they never see, but who are inimical 
to them, and whose ways are inscrutable. 

If there are any inland shops which can hold 
one longer than the place where that ship's por- 
trait hangs, then I do not know them. That 
comes from no more, of course, than the usual 
fault of an early impression. That fault gives 
a mould to the mind, and our latest thoughts, 
which we try to make reasonable, betray that 
accidental shape. It may be said that I looked 

[13] 



London River 

into this window while still soft. The conse- 
quence, everybody knows, would be incurable 
in a boy who saw sextants for the first time, 
compasses, patent logs, sounding-machines, 
signalling gear, and the other secrets of naviga- 
tors. And not only those things. There was 
a section given to books, with classics like 
Stevens on Stowage^ and Norie's Navigation^ 
volumes never seen west of Gracechurch 
Street. The books were all for the eyes of 
sailors, and were sorted by chance. Knots and 
Splices, Typee, Know Your Own Ship, the 
South Pacific Directory, and Castaway on the 
Auckland Islands. There were many of them, 
and they were in that fortuitous and attractive 
order. The back of every volume had to be 
read, though the light was bad. On one wall 
between the windows a specimen chart was 
framed. Maps are good; but how much bet- 
ter are charts, especially when you cannot read 
them except by guessing at their cryptic letter- 
ing! About the coast line the fathom marks 
cluster thickly, and venture to sea in lines 
which attenuate, or become sparse clusters, till 
the chart is blank, being beyond soundings. 
At the capes are red dots, with arcs on the sea- 
ward side to show at what distance mariners 
pick up the real lights at night. Through 

[14] 



The Foreshore 

such windows, boys with bills of lading and 
mates' receipts in their pockets, being on er- 
rands to shipowners, look outward, and only 
seem to look inward. Where are the confines 
of London? 

Opposite Poverty Corner there is, or used 
to be, an archway into a courtyard where in 
one old office the walls were hung with half- 
models of sailing ships. I remember the name 
of one, the Winefred. Deed-boxes stood on 
shelves, with the name of a ship on each. 
There was a mahogany counter, an encrusted 
pewter inkstand, desks made secret with high 
screens, and a silence that might have been 
the reproof to intruders of a repute remem- 
bered in dignity behind the screens by those 
who kept waiting so unimportant a visitor as 
a boy. On the counter was a stand displaying 
sailing cards, announcing, among other events 
in London River, ''the fine ship Blackadder 
for immediate dispatch, having most of her 
cargo engaged, to Brisbane." And in those 
days, just round the corner in Billiter Street, 
one of the East India Company's warehouses 
survived, a sombre relic among the new lime- 
stone and red granite offices, a massive arch- 
way in its centre leading, it could be believed, 
to an enclosure of night left by the eighteenth 

[15] 



London River 

century, and forgotten. I never saw anybody 
go into it, or come out. How could they? 
It was of another time and place. The famil- 
iar Tower, the Guildhall that we knew nearly 
as well, the Cathedral which certainly ex- 
isted, for it could often be seen in the distance, 
and the Abbey that was little more than some- 
thing we had heard named, they were but the 
scenery close to the buses. Yet London was 
more wonderful than anything they could 
make it appear. About Fenchurch Street and 
Leadenhall Street wagons could be seen go- 
ing east, bearing bales and cases, and the pack- 
ages were port-marked for Sourabaya, Para, 
Ilo-Ilo, and Santos — names like those. They 
had to be seen to be believed. You could 
stand there, forced to think that the sun never 
did more than make the floor of asphalted 
streets glow like polished brass, and that the 
evening light was full of glittering motes and 
smelt of dust, and that life worked itself out in 
cupboards made of glass and mahogany; and 
suddenly you learned, while smelling the dust, 
that Acapulco was more than a portent in a 
book and held only by an act of faith. Yet 
that astonishing revelation, enough to make 
any youthful messenger forget where he him- 
self was bound, through turning to follow with 

[i6] 



The Foreshore 

his eyes that acceptance by a carrier's cart of 
the verity of the fable, is nowhere mentioned, 
I have found since, in any guide to London, 
though you may learn how Cornhill got its 
name. 

For though Londoners understand the 
Guildhall pigeons have as much right to the 
place as the aldermen, they look upon the sea- 
birds by London Bridge as vagrant strangers. 
They do not know where their city ends on the 
east side. Their River descends from Oxford 
in more than one sense. It has little history 
worth mentioning below Westminster. To 
the poets, the River becomes flat and songless 
where at Richmond the sea's remote influence 
just moves it; and there they leave it. The 
Thames goes down then to a wide grey vacuity, 
a featureless monotony where men but toil, 
where life becomes silent in effort, and goes 
out through fogs to nowhere in particular. 
But there is a hill-top at Woolwich from 
which, better than from Richmond, our River, 
the burden-bearer, the road which joins us to 
New York and Sydney, can be seen for what it 
is, plainly related to a vaster world, with the 
ships upon its bright path moving through the 
smoke and buildings of the City. And surely 
some surmise of what our River is comes to 

[17] 



London River 

a few of that multitude who cross London 
Bridge every day? They favour the east side 
of it, I have noticed, and they cannot always 
resist a pause to stare overside to the Pool. 
Why do they? Ships are there, it is true, but 
only insignificant traders, diminished by som- 
bre cliffs up which their cargo is hauled piece- 
meal to vanish instantly into mid-air caverns; 
London absorbs all they have as morsels. 
Anyhow, it is the business of ships. The 
people on the bridge watch another life be- 
low, with its strange cries and mysterious 
movements. A leisurely wisp of steam rises 
from a steamer's funnel. She is alive and 
breathing, though motionless. The walls en- 
closing the Pool are spectral in a winter light, 
and might be no more than the almost forgot- 
ten memory of a dark past. Looking at them 
intently, to give them a name, the wayfarer 
on the bridge could imagine they were main- 
tained there only by the frail effort of his will. 
Once they were, but now, in some moods, they 
are merely remembered. Only the men busy 
on the deck of the ship below are real. 
Through an arch beneath the feet a barge 
shoots out noiselessly on the ebb, and staring 
down at its sudden apparition you feel dizzily 
that it has the bridge in tow, and that all you 

[1 8] 



The Foreshore 

people on it are being drawn unresisting into 
that lower world of shades. You release your- 
self from this' spell with an effort, and look at 
the faces of those who are beside you at the 
parapet. What are their thoughts? Do they 
know? Have they also seen the ghosts? 
Have they felt stirring a secret and forgotten 
desire, old memories, tales that were told? 
They move away and go to their desks, or to 
their homes in the suburbs. A vessel that has 
hauled into the fairway calls for the Tower 
Bridge gates to be opened for her. She is go- 
ing. We watch the eastern mists take her 
from us. For we never are so passive and 
well-disciplined to the things which compel us 
but rebellion comes at times — misgiving that 
there is a world beyond the one we know, re- 
gret that we never ventured and made no dis- 
covery, and that our time has been saved and 
not spent. The gates to the outer world close 
again. 

There, where that ship vanished, is the high- 
way which brought those unknown folk 
whose need created London out of reeds and 
mere. It is our oldest road, and now has many 
bypaths. Near Poverty Corner is a building 
which recently was dismissed with a brief^ 
humorous reference in a new guide to our City 

[19] 



London River 

— a cobbled forecourt, tame pigeons, cabs, a 
brick front topped by a clock-face : Fenchurch 
Street Station. Beyond its dingy platforms, 
the metal track which contracts into the murk 
is the road to China, though that is, perhaps, 
the last place you would guess to be at the end 
of it. The train runs over a wilderness of 
tiles, a grey plateau of bare slate and rock, its 
expanse cracked and scored as though by a 
withering heat. Nothing grows there; noth- 
ing could live there. Smoke still pours from 
it, as though it were volcanic, from number- 
less vents. The region is without sap. Above 
its expanse project superior fumaroles, their 
drifting vapours dissolving great areas. When 
the track descends slightly, you see cavities in 
that cliff which runs parallel with your track. 
The desert is actually burrowed, and every hole 
in the plateau is a habitation. Something does 
live there. That region of burnt and fissured 
rock is tunneled and inhabited. The unlikely 
serrations and ridges with the smoke moving 
over them are porous, and a fluid life ranges 
beneath unseen. It is the beginning of Dock- 
land. That the life is in upright beings, each 
with independent volition and a soul; that it is 
not an amorphous movement, flowing in bulk 
through buried pipes, incapable of the idea 

[20] 



The Foreshore 

of height, of rising, it is difficult to believe. 
It has not been believed. If life, you protest, 
is really there, has any purpose which is better 
than that of extending worm-like through the 
underground, then why, at intervals, is there 
not an upheaval, a geyser-like burst, a plain 
hint from a power usually pent, but liable to 
go skywards? But that is for the desert to an- 
swer. As by mocking chance the desert itself 
almost instantly shows what possibilities are 
hidden vv^ithin it. The train roars unexpect- 
edly over a viaduct, and below is a deep hollow 
filled with light, with a floor of water, and a 
surprise of ships. How did that white schoon- 
er get into such an enclosure? Is freedom 
nearer here than we thought? 

The crust of roofs ends abruptly in a coun- 
try which is a complexity of gasometers, ca- 
nals, railway junctions, between which cab- 
bage fields in long spokes radiate from the 
train and revolve. There is the grotesque 
suggestion of many ships in the distance, for 
through gaps in a nondescript horizon masts 
appear in a kaleidoscopic way. The journey 
ends, usually in the rain, among iron sheds 
that are topped on the far side by the rigging 
and smoke-stacks of great liners. There is no 
doubt about it now. At the corner of one 

[21] 



London River 

shed, sheltering from the weather, is a group 
of brown men in coloured rags, first seen in the 
gloom because of the whites of their eyes. 
What we remember of such a day is that it 
was half of night, and the wind hummed in the 
cordage, and swayed wildly the loose gear 
aloft. Towering hulls were ranged down 
each side of a lagoon that ended in vacancy. 
The rigging and funnels of the fleet were un- 
related ; those ships were phantom and mon- 
strous. They seemed on too great a scale to be 
within human control. We felt diminished 
and a little fearful, as among the looming ur- 
gencies of a dream. The forms were gigantic 
but vague, and they were seen in a smother of 
the elements; and their sounds, deep and 
mournful, were like the warnings of something 
alien, yet without form, which we knew was 
adverse, but could not recall when awake 
again. We remember, that day, a few 
watchers insecure on an exposed dockhead that 
projected into a sullen dreariness of river and 
mud which could have been the finish of the 
land. At the end of a creaking hawser was 
a steamer canting as she backed to head down- 
stream — now she was exposed to a great ad- 
venture — the tide rapid and noisy on her 
plates, the reek from her funnel sinking over 

[22] 



The Foreshore 

the water. And from the dockhead, in the 
fuddle of a rain-squall, we were waving a 
handkerchief, probably to the wrong man, till 
the vessel went out where all was one — rain, 
river, mud, and sky, and the future. 

It is afterwards that so strange an ending 
to a brief journey from a City station is seen 
to have had more in it than the time-table, 
hurriedly scanned, gave away. Or it would 
be remembered as strange, if the one who had 
to make that journey as much as thought of it 
again; for perhaps to a stranger occupied with 
more important matters it was passed as being 
quite relevant to the occasion, ordinary and 
rather dismal, the usual boredom of a duty. 
Its strangeness depends, very likely, as much 
on an idle and squandering mind as on the 
ships, the River, and the gasometers. Yet 
suppose you first saw the River from Black- 
wall Stairs, in the days when the windows of 
the Artichoke Tavern, an ancient, weather- 
boarded house with benches outside, still 
looked towards the shipS' coming in! And 
how if then, one evening, you had seen a 
Blackwall liner haul out for the Antipodes 
while her crew sang a chanty! It might put 
another light on the River, but a light, I will 
admit, which others should not be expected to 

[23] 



London River 

see, and if they looked for it now might not 
discover, for it is possible that it has vanished, 
like the old tavern. It is easy to persuade our- 
selves that a matter is made plain by the light 
in which we prefer to see it, for it is our light. 
One day, I remember, a boy had to take a 
sheaf of documents to a vessel loading in the 
London Dock. She was sailing that tide. It 
was a hot July noon. It is unlucky to send a 
boy, who is marked by all the omens for a City 
prisoner, to that dock, for it is one of the best 
of its kind. He had not been there before. 
There was an astonishing vista, once inside the 
gates, of sherry butts and port casks. On the 
flagstones were pools of wine lees. There was 
an unforgettable smell. It was of wine, 
spices, oakum, wool, and hides. The sun 
made it worse, but the boy, I think, preferred 
it strong. After wandering along many old 
quays, and through the openings of dark sheds 
that, on so sunny a day, were stored with cool 
night and cubes and planks of gold, he found 
his ship, the Mulatto Girl. She was for the 
Brazils. Now it is clear that one even wiser 
in shipping afifairs than a boy would have 
expected to see a craft that was haughty and 
portentous when bound for the Brazils, a ship 
that looked equal to making a coast of that 

[24] 



The Foreshore 

kind. There she was, her flush deck well be- 
low the quay wall. A ladder went down to 
her, for she was no more than a schooner of a 
little over one hundred tons. If that did not 
look like the beginning of one of those 
voyages reputed to have ended with the Eliz- 
abethans, then I am trying to convey a wrong 
impression. On the deck of the Mulatto Girl 
was her master, in shirt and trousers and a 
remarkable straw hat more like a canopy, 
bending over to discharge some weighty 
words into the hatch. He rose and looked up 
at the boy on the quay, showing then a taut 
black beard and formidable eyes. With his 
hands on his hips, he surveyed for a few sec- 
onds, without speaking, the messenger above. 
Then he talked business, and more than legit- 
imate business. ''Do you want to come?" he 
asked, and smiled. ''Eh?" He stroked his 
beard. (The Brazils and all! A ship like 
that!) "There's a berth for you. Come 
along, my son." And observe what we may 
lose through that habit of ours of uncritical 
obedience to duty; see what may leave us for 
ever in that fatal pause, caused by the surprise 
of the challenge to our narrow experience and 
knowledge, the pause in which we allow habit 
to overcome adventurous instinct! I never 

[25] 



London River 

heard again of the Mulatto Girl, I could not 
expect to. Something, though, was gained 
that day. It cannot be named. It is of no 
value. It is, you may have guessed, that very 
light which it has been admitted may since 
have gone out. 

Well, nobody who has ever surprised that 
light in Dockland will be persuaded that it 
is not there still, and will remain. But what 
could strangers see of it? The foreshore to 
them is the unending monotony of grey streets, 
sometimes grim, often decayed, and always re- 
ticent and sullen, that might never have seen 
the stars nor heard of good luck; and the light 
would be, when closely looked at, merely a 
high gas bracket on a dank wall in solitude, 
its glass broken, and the flame within it flut- 
tering to extinction like an imprisoned and 
crippled moth trying to evade the squeeze of 
giant darkness and the wind. The narrow 
and forbidding by-path under that glim, a 
path intermittent and depending on the weight 
of the night which is trying to blot it out alto- 
gether, goes to Wapping Old Stairs. Prince 
Rupert once went that way. The ketch Non- 
such, Captain Zachary Gillam, was then lying 
just off, about to make the voyage which estab- 
lished the Hudson's Bay Company. 

[26] 



The Foreshore 

It is a path, like all those stairs and ways 
that go down to the River, which began when 
human footsteps first outlined London with 
rough tracks. It is a path by which the de- 
scendants of those primitives went out of 
London, when projecting the original enter- 
prise of their forbears from Wapping to the 
Guinea Coast and Manitoba. Why should we 
believe it is different today? The sea does 
not change, and seamen are what they were 
if their ships are not those we admired many 
years ago in the India Docks. It is impos- 
sible for those who know them to see those 
moody streets of Dockland, indeterminate, for 
they follow the River, which run from Tooioy 
Street by the Hole-in-the-Wall to the Dcpt- 
ford docks, and from Tower Hill along Wap- 
ping High Street to Limehouse and the Isle 
of Dogs, as strangers would see them. What 
could they be to strangers? Mud, taverns, 
pawnshops, neglected and obscure churches, 
and houses that might know nothing but ill- 
fortune. 

So they are ; but those ways hold more than 
the visible shades. The warehouses of that 
meandering chasm which is Wapping High 
Street are like weathered and unequal cliffs. 
It is hard to believe sunlight ever falls there. 

[27] 



London River 

It could not get down. It is not easy to be- 
lieve the River is near. It seldom shows. 
You think at times you hear the distant call of 
a ship. But what would that be? Some- 
thing in the mind. It happened long ago. 
You, too, are a ghost left by the vanished past. 
There is a man above at a high loophole, 
the topmost cave of a warehouse which you 
can see has been exposed to commerce and 
the elements for ages; he pulls in a bale pen- 
dulous from the cable of a derrick. Below 
him one of the horses of a van tosses its nose- 
bag. There is no other movement. A car- 
man leans against an iron post, and cuts bread 
and cheese with a clasp-knife. It was curi- 
ous to hear that steamer call, but we knew 
what it was. It was from a ship that went 
down, we have lately heard, in the War, and 
her spectre reminds us, from a voyage which 
is over, of men we shall see no more. But the 
call comes again just where the Stairs, like a 
shining wedge of day, hold the black ware- 
houses asunder, and give us the light of the 
River and a release to the outer world. And 
there, moving swiftly across the brightness, 
goes a steamer outward bound. 

That was what we wanted to know. She 
confirms it, and her signal, to whomever it 

[28] 



The Foreshore 

was made, carries farther than she would 
guess. It is understood. The past for some 
of us now is our only populous and habitable 
world, invisible to others, but alive with 
whispers for us. Yet the sea still moves daily 
along the old foreshore, and ships still come 
and go, and do not, like us, run aground on 
what now is not there. 



[29] 



IL A Midnight Voyage 



IL A Midnight Voyage 

OUR voyage was to begin at midnight 
from near Limehouse Hole. The 
hour and the place have been less 
promising in the beginning of many a strange 
adventure. Where the voyage would end 
could not be said, except that it would be in 
Bugsby's Reach, and at some time or other. 
It was now ten o'clock, getting towards sailing 
time, and the way to the foreshore was un- 
lighted and devious. Yet it was somewhere 
near. This area of still and empty night 
railed off from the glare of the Commercial 
Road would be Limehouse Church. It is 
foolish to suppose you know the Tower 
Hamlets because you have seen them by day. 
They change. They are like those uncanny 
folk of the fables. At night, wonderfully, 
they become something else, take another 
form, which has never been more than 
glimpsed, and another character, so fabulous 
and secret that it will support the tales of the 
wildest romanticist, who rightly feels that if 
such yarns were told of 'Frisco or Timbuctoo 

[33] 



London River 

they might get found out. Was this the 
church? Three Chinamen were disputing 
by its gate. Perhaps they were in disagree- 
ment as to where the church would be in day- 
light. 

At a corner where the broad main channel 
of electric light ended, and perplexity began, 
a policeman stood, and directed me into chaos. 
''Anywhere," he explained, ''anywhere down 
there will do." I saw a narrow alley in the 
darkness, which had one gas lamp and many 
cobbled stones. At the bottom of the lane 
were three iron posts. Beyond the posts a 
bracket lamp showed a brick wall, and in the 
wall was an arch so full of gloom that it 
seemed impassable, except to a steady draught 
of cold air that might have been the midnight 
itself entering Limehouse from its own place. 
At the far end of that opening in the wall was 
nothing. I stood on an invisible wooden 
platform and looked into nothing with no 
belief that a voyage could begin from there. 
Before me then should have been the Thames, 
at the top of the flood tide. It was not seen. 
There was only a black void dividing some 
clusters of brilliant but remote and diminished 
lights. There were odd stars which detached 
themselves from the fixed clusters, and moved 

[34] 



A Midnight Voyage 

in the void, sounding the profundity of the 
chasm beneath them with lines of trembling 
fire. Such a wandering comet drifted near 
where I stood on the verge of nothing, and 
then it was plain that its trail of quivering 
light did not sound, but floated and undulated 
on a travelling road — that chasm before me 
was black because it was filled with fluid 
night. Night, I discovered suddenly, was in 
irresistible movement. It was swift and 
heavy. It was unconfined. It was welling 
higher to douse our feeble glims and to foun- 
der London, built of shadows on its boundary. 
It moved with frightful quietness. It seemed 
confident of its power. It swirled and eddied 
by the piles of the wharf, and there it found a 
voice, though that was muffled; yet now and 
then it broke into levity for a moment, as at 
some shrouded and alien jest. 

There were sounds which reached me at 
last from the opposite shore, faint with dis- 
tance and terror. The warning from an 
unseen steamer going out was as if a soul, cross- 
ing this Styx, now knew all. There is no 
London on the Thames, after sundown. Most 
of us know very little of the River by day. 
It might then be no more native to our capital 
than the Orientals who stand under the Lime- 

[35] 



London River 

house gas lamps at night. It surprises us. 
We turn and look at it from our seat in a 
tram, and watch a barge going down on the 
ebb — it luckily misses the piers of Blackfriars 
Bridge — as if a door had unexpectedly opened 
on a mystery, revealing another world in 
London, and another sort of life than ours. 
It is as uncanny as if we had sensed another 
dimension of space. The tram gets among 
the buildings again, and we are reassured by 
the confined and arid life we know. But 
what a light and width had that surprising 
world where we saw a barge drifting as lei- 
surely as though the narrow limits which we 
call reality were there unknown! 

But after dark there is not only no River, 
when you stand where by day is its foreshore ; 
there is no London. Then, looking out from 
Limehouse, you might be the only surviving 
memory of a city that has vanished. You 
might be solitary among the unsubstantial 
shades, for about you are only comets passing 
through space, and inscrutable shapes; your 
neighbours are Cassiopeia and the Great Bear. 

But where was our barge, the Lizzie? I 
became aware abruptly of the skipper of this 
ship for our midnight voyage among the stars. 
He had his coat-collar raised. The Lizzie, 

[36] 



A Midnight Voyage 

he said, was now free of the mud, and he was 
going to push off. Sitting on a bollard, and 
pulling out his tobacco-pouch, he said he 
hadn't had her out before. Sorry he'd got to 
do it now. She was a bitch. She bucked 
her other man overboard three days ago. 
They hadn't found him yet. They found her 
down by Gallions Reach. Jack Jones was the 
other chap. Old Rarzo they called him. 
Took more than a little to give him that 
colour. But he was All Right. They were 
going to give a benefit concert for his wife 
and kids. Jack's brother was going to sing; 
good as Harry Lauder, he is. 

Below us a swirl of water broke into mirth, 
instantly suppressed. We could see the Liz- 
zie now. The ripples slipped round her to 
the tune of they-'avn't-found-'im-yet, they- 
'avn't-found-'im-yet-they 'avn't. The skipper 
and crew rose, fumbling at his feet for a rope. 
There did not seem to be much of the Lizzie. 
She was but a little raft to drift out on those 
tides which move among the stars. ^^Now's 
your chance," said her crew, and I took it, on 
all fours. The last remnant of London was 
then pushed from us with a pole. We were 
launched on night, which had begun its ebb 
towards morning. 

[37] 



London River 

The punt sidled away obliquely for mid- 
stream. I stood at one end of it. The figure 
of Charon could be seen at the other, of long 
acquaintance with this passage, using his 
sweep with the indifference of habitude. Per- 
haps it was not Charon. Yet there was some 
obstruction to the belief that we were bound 
for no more than the steamer Aldebaran, 
anchored in Bugsby's Reach. From the low 
deck of the barge it was surprising that the 
River, whose name was Night, was content 
with the height to which it had risen. Per- 
haps it was taking its time. It might soon 
receive an influx from space, rise then in a 
silent upheaval, and those low shadows that 
were London, even now half foundered, would 
at once go. This darkness was an irrespon- 
sible power. It was the same flood which 
had sunk Knossos and Memphis. It was tran- 
quil, indifferent, knowing us not, reckoning 
us all one with the Sumerians. They were 
below it. It had risen above them. Now 
the time had come when it was laving the 
base of London. 

The crew cried out to us that over there 
was the entrance to the West India Dock. 
We knew that place in another life. But 
should Charon joke with us? We saw onlv 

[38] 



A Midnight Voyage 

chaos, in which the beams from a reputed 
city glimmered without purpose. 

The shadow of the master of our black 
barge pulled at his sweep with a slow con- 
fidence that was fearful amid what was sight- 
less and unknown. His pipe glowed, as with 
the profanity of an immortal to whom eternity 
and infinity are of the usual significance. 
Then a red and green eye appeared astern, 
and there was a steady throbbing as if some 
monster were in pursuit of us. A tug shaped 
near us, drew level, and exposed with its fires, 
as it went ahead, a radiant Lizzie on an area 
of water that leaped in red flames. The fur- 
nace door of the tug was shut, and at once we 
were blind. ^'Hold hard," yelled our skipper, 
and the Lizzie slipped into the turmoil of 
the tug's wake. 

There would be Millwall. The tug and 
the turmoil had gone. We were alone again 
in the beyond. There was no sound now but 
the water spattering under our craft, and the 
fumbling and infrequent splash of the sweep. 
Once we heard the miniature bark of a dog, 
distinct and fine, as though distance had re- 
fined it as well as reduced it. We were nearly 
round the loop the River makes about Mill- 
wall, and this unknown region before us was 

[39] 



London River 

Blackwall Reach by day, and Execution Dock 
used to be dead ahead. To the east, over the 
waters, red light exploded fan-wise and pulsed 
on the clouds latent above, giving them mo- 
mentary form. It was as though, from the 
place where it starts, the dawn had been re- 
leased too soon, and was at once recalled. 
'The gas works," said the skipper. 

Still the slow drift, quite proper to those 
at large in eternity. But this, I was told, 
was the beginning of Bugsby's Reach. It 
was first a premonition, then a doubt, and 
at last a distinct tremor in the darkness ahead 
of us. A light appeared, grew nearer, higher, 
and brighter, and there was a suspicion of 
imminent mass. 'Watch her," warned the 
skipper. Watch what? There was nothing 
to watch but the dark and some planets far 
away, one of them red. The menacing one 
still grew higher and brighter. It came at 
us. A wall instantly appeared to overhang 
us, with a funnel and masts above it, and our 
skipper's yell was lost in the thunder of a 
churning propeller. The air shuddered, and 
a siren hooted in the heavens. A long, dark 
body seemed minutes going by us, and our 
skipper's insults were taken in silence by her 
superior deck. She left us riotous in her wake, 

[40] 



A Midnight Voyage 

and we continued our journey dancing our 
indignation on the uneasy deck of the Lizzie. 

The silent drift recommenced, and we 
neared a region of unearthly lights and the 
smell of sulphur, where aerial skeletons, vast 
and black, and columns and towers, alternately 
glowed and vanished as the doors of infernal 
fires were opened and shut. We drew abreast 
of this phantom place where flames and dark- 
ness battled amid gigantic ruin. Charon 
spoke. "They're the coal wharves," he said. 

The lights of a steamer rose in the night 
below the wharves, but it was our own pro- 
gress which brought them nearer. She was 
anchored. We made out at last her shape, 
but at first she did not answer our hail. 

"Hullo, Aldebaran/' once more roared our 
captain. 

There w^as no answer. In a minute we 
should be by her, and too late. 

"Barge ahoy!" came a voice. "Look out 
for a line." 



[41] 



III. A Shipping Parish 



III. A Shipping Parish 

WHAT face this shipping parish shows 
to a stranger I do not know. I was 
never a stranger to it. I should 
suppose it to be a face almost vacant, perhaps 
a little conventionally picturesque, for it is 
grey and seamed. It might be even an al- 
together expressionless mask, staring at noth- 
ing. Anyhow, there must be very little to be 
learned from it, for those bright young cul- 
tured strangers, admirable in their eagerness 
for social service, who come and live with us 
for a time, so that they may understand the life 
of the poor, never seem to have made any- 
thing of us. They say they have; they speak 
even with some amount of assurance, at places 
where the problem which is us is examined 
aloud by confident politicians and churchfolk. 
But I think they know well enough that they 
always failed to get anywhere near what mind 
we have. There is a reason for it, of course. 
Think of honest and sociable Mary Ann, of 
Pottles Rents, E., having been alarmed by 

[45] 



London River 

the behaviour of good society, as it is betrayed 
in the popular picture Press, making odd calls 
in Belgravia (the bells for visitors, too), to 
bring souls to God. 

My parish, to strangers, must be opaque 
with its indifference. It stares beyond the 
interested visitor, in the way the sad and dis- 
illusioned have, to things it supposes a stranger 
would not understand if he were told. He 
has reason, therefore, to say we are dull. And 
Dockland, with its life so uniform that it 
could be an amorphous mass overflowing a 
reef of brick cells, I think would be distressing 
to a sensitive stranger, and even a little terrify- 
ing, as all that is alive but inexplicable must 
be. No more conscious purpose shows in our 
existence than is seen in the coral polyp. We 
just go on increasing and forming more cells. 
Overlooking our wilderness of tiles in the rain 
— we get more than a fair share of rain, or 
else the sad quality of wet weather is more 
noticeable in such a place as ours — it seems a 
dismal affair to present for the intelligent 
labours of mankind for generations. Could 
nothing better have been done than that? 
What have we been busy about? 

Well, what are people busy about anywhere? 
Human purpose here has been as blind and 

[46] 



A Shipping Parish 

sporadic as it is at Westminster, unrelated to 
any fixed star, lucky to fill the need of the day, 
building without any distant design, flowing 
in bulk through the lowest channels that 
offered. As elsewhere, it is obstructed by the 
unrecognized mistakes of its past. Our part 
of London, like Kensington or Islington, is 
but the formless accretion of countless swarms 
of life which had no common endeavour; and 
so here we are. Time's latest deposit, the vas- 
cular stratum of this area of the earth's rind, 
a sensitive surface flourishing during its day 
on the piled strata of the dead. Yet this is 
the reef to which I am connected by tissue 
and bone. Cut the kind of life you find in 
Poplar and I must bleed. I cannot detach 
myself, and write of it. Like any other atom, 
I would show the local dirt, if examined. My 
hand moves, not loyally so much as instinc- 
tively, to impulses which come from beneath 
and so out of a stranger's knowledge; out of 
my own, too, largely. 

Is that all? Not quite. Where you, if 
you came to us, would see but an unremark- 
able level of East-Enders, much like other 
Londoners, with no past worth recording, and 
no future likely to be worth a book of gold, I 
see, looking to the past, a spectral show of fine 

[47] 



London River 

ships and brave affairs, and good men forgot- 
ten, or almost forgotten, and moving among 
the plainer shades of its foreground some 
ghosts well known to me. I think they were 
what are called failures in life. And turning 
from those shades, and their work which went 
the way of all forgotten stuff before the inex- 
orable tide of affairs, I look forward from 
Poplar, unreasonably hopeful (for so we are 
made), though this time into the utter dark, 
for the morning that shall show us the more 
enduring towers of the city of our dreams, the 
heart of the commune, the radiant spires of 
the city that shall be lovelier than that dear 
city of Cecrops. 

But for those whose place it is not, memo- 
ries and dreams can do nothing to transform it. 
Dockland would seem to others as any alien 
town would seem to me. There is something, 
though, you must grant us, a heritage pecu- 
liarly ours. Amid our packed tenements, into 
the dark mass where poorer London huddles 
as my shipping parish, are set our docks. 
Embayed in the obscurity are those areas of 
captured day, reservoirs of light brimmed 
daily by the tides of the sun, silver mirrors 
through which one may leave the dark floor 
of Poplar for radiant other worlds. We 

[48] 



A Shipping Parish 

have our ships and docks, and the River at 
Blackwall when night and the flood come 
together, and walls and roofs which topmasts 
and funnels surmount, suggestions of a vaga- 
bondage hidden in what seemed so arid a 
commonplace desert. These are of first im- 
portance. They are our ways of escape. We 
are not kept within a division of the map. 
And Orion, he strides over our roofs on bright 
winter nights. We have the immortals. At 
the most, your official map sets us only lateral 
bounds. The heavens here are as high as 
elsewhere. Our horizon is beyond our own 
limits. In this faithful chronicle of our 
parish I must tell of our boundaries as I 
know them. They are not so narrow as you 
might think. Maps cannot be so carefully 
planned, nor walls built high enough nor 
streets confined and strict enough, to hold 
within limits our lusty and growing popula- 
tion of thoughts. There is no census you can 
take which will give you forewarning of what 
is growing here, of the way we increase and 
expand. Take care. Some day, when we 
discover the time has come for it, we shall tell 
our numbers, and be sure you will then learn 
the result. Travelling through our part of 
the country, you see but our appearance. 

[49] 



London River 

You go, and report us casually to your friends, 
and forget us. But when you feel the ground 
moving under your feet, that will be us. 

From my high window in central Dock- 
land, as from a watch tower, I look out over 
a tumbled waste of roofs and chimneys, a 
volcanic desert, inhabited only by sparrows 
and pigeons. Humanity burrows in swarms 
below that surface of crags, but only faint 
cries tell me that the rocks are caverned and 
inhabited, that life flows there unseen through 
subterranean galleries. Often, when the sun- 
rise over the roofs is certainly the coming of 
Aurora, as though then the first illumination 
of the sky heralded the veritable dayspring 
for which we look, and the gods were nearly 
here, I have watched for that crust beneath, 
which seals the sleepers under, to heave and 
roll, to burst, and for released humanity 
to pour through fractures, from the lower 
dark, to be renewed in the fires of the morn- 
ing. Nothing has happened yet. But I am 
confident it would repay society to appoint 
another watcher when I am gone, to keep an 
eye on the place. 

Right below my window there are two 
ridges running in parallel jags of chimneys, 
with a crevasse between them to which I can 

[50] 



A Shipping Parish 

see no bottom. But a roadway is there. 
From an acute angle of the window a cornice 
overhangs a sheer fall of clifif. That is as 
near the ground as can be got from my out- 
look. Several superior peaks rise out of the 
wilderness, where the churches are; and be- 
yond the puzzling middle distance, where 
smoke dissolves all form, loom the dock ware- 
houses, a continuous range of far dark heights. 
I have thoughts of a venturesome and lonely 
journey by moonlight, in and out of the 
chimney stacks, and all the way to the distant 
mountains. It looks inviting, and possible, by 
moonlight. And, indeed, any bright day in 
summer, from my window. Dockland with 
its goblin-like chimneys might be the en- 
chanted country of a child's dream, where 
shapes, though inanimate, are watchful and 
protean. From that silent world legions of 
grotesques move out of the shadows at a touch 
of sunlight, and then, when you turn on them 
in surprise, become thin and vague, either 
phantoms or smoke, and dissolve. The freak- 
ish light shows in little what happens in the 
long run to man's handiwork, for it accelerates 
the speed of change till change is fast enough 
for you to watch a town grow and die. You 
see that Dockland is unstable, is in flux, alters 

[51] 



London River 

in colours and form. I doubt whether the 
people below are sensitive to this ironic dis- 
play on their roofs. 

My eyes more frequently go to one place in 
that high country. In that distant line of 
warehouses is a break, and there occasionally 
I see the masts and spars of a tall ship, and I 
remember that beyond my dark horizon of 
warehouses is the path down which she has 
come from the Indies to Blackwall. I said we 
were not inland. Cassiopeia is in that direc- 
tion, and China over there. 

For my outlook is more than the centre of 
Dockland. I call it the centre of the world. 
Our high road is part of the main thorough- 
fare from Kensington to Valparaiso. Every 
wanderer must come this way at least once in 
his life. We are the hub whence all roads go 
to the circumference. A ship does not go 
down but we hear the cry of distress, and the 
house of a neighbour rocks on the flood and 
is lost, casting its people adrift on the blind 
tides. 

Think of some of our street names — Mala- 
bar Street, Amoy Place, Nankin Street, Pekin 
Street, Canton Street. And John Company 
has left its marks. You pick up hints of the 
sea here as you pick old shells out of dunes. 

[52] 



A Shipping Parish 

We have, still flourishing in a garden, John 
Company's Chapel of St. Matthias, a frag- 
ment of a time that was, where now the vigor- 
ous commercial life of the Company shows 
no evidence whatever of its previous urgent 
importance. Founded in the time of the 
Commonwealth as a symbol for the Com- 
pany's men who, when in rare moments they 
looked up from the engrossing business of 
their dominant hours, desired a reminder of 
the ineffable things beyond ships and car- 
goes, the Chapel has survived all the changes 
which destroyed their ships and scattered the 
engrossing business of their working hours 
into dry matter for antiquaries. So little do 
men really change. They always leave their 
temples, whether they lived in Poplar or 
Nineveh. Only the names of their gods 
change. The Chapel at Poplar it was then, 
when this shipping parish had no docks, and 
the nearest church was over the fields to Step- 
ney. Our vessels then lay in the river. We 
got our first dock, that of the West India 
Merchants, at the beginning of last century. 
A little later the East India Dock was built 
by John Company. Then another phase be- 
gan to reshape Dockland. There came a 
time when the Americans looked in a fair 

[S3] 



London River 

way, sailing ahead fast with the wonderful 
clippers Donald McKay was building at 
Boston, to show us a tow rope. The best 
sailers ever launched were those Yankee ships, 
and the Thames building yards were working 
to create the ideal clipper which should beat 
them. This really was the last effort of sails, 
for steamers were on the seas, and the Amer- 
icans were actually making heroic efforts to 
smother them with canvas. Mr. Green, of 
Poplar, worried over those Boston craft, de- 
clared we must be first again, and first we 
were. But both Boston and Poplar, in their 
efforts to perfect an old idea, did not see a 
crude but conquering notion taking form to 
magnify and hasten both commerce and war. 
But they were worth doing, those clippers, 
and worth remembering. They sail clear 
into our day as imperishable memories. 
They still live, for they did far more than 
carry merchandise. When an old mariner 
speaks of the days of studding sails it is not 
the precious freight, the real purpose of his 
ships, which animates his face. What we 
always remember afterwards is not the thing 
we did, or tried to do, but the friends who 
were about us at the time. But our stately 
ships themselves, with our River their home, 

[54] 



A Shipping Parish 

which gave Poplar's name, wherever they 
went, a ring on the counter like a sound guinea, 
at the most they are now but planks bearded 
with sea grass, lost in ocean currents, sighted 
only by the albatross. 

Long ago nearly every home in Dockland 
treasured a lithographic portrait of one of the 
beauties, framed and hung where visitors 
could see it as soon as they entered the door. 
Each of us knew one of them, her runs and 
her records, the skipper and his fads, the 
owner and his prejudice about the last penny- 
worth of tar. She was not a transporter to 
us, an earner of freights, something to which 
was attached a profit and loss account and 
an insurance policy. She had a name. She 
was a sentient being, perhaps noble, per- 
haps wilful; she might have any quality of 
character, even malice. I have seen hands 
laid on her with affection in dock, when those 
who knew her were telling me of her ways. 

To few of the newer homes among the later 
streets of Dockland is that beautiful lady's 
portrait known. Here and there it survives, 
part of the flotsam which has drifted through 
the years with grandmother's sandalwood 
chest, the last of the rush-bottomed chairs, 
and the lacquered tea-caddy. I well remem- 

[55] 



London River 

ber a room from which such survivals were 
saved when the household ship ran on a coffin, 
and foundered. It was a front parlour in 
one of the streets with an Oriental name; 
which, I cannot be expected to remember, 
for when last I was in that room I was lifted 
to sit on one of its horsehair chairs, its 
seat like a hedgehog, and I was cautioned to 
sit still. It was rather a long drop to the 
floor from a chair for me in those days, and 
though sitting still was hard, sliding part of 
the way would have been much worse. That 
was a room for holy days, too, a place for good 
behaviour, and boots profaned it. Its door 
was nearly always shut and locked, and only 
the chance formal visit of respect-worthy 
strangers brought down its key from the top 
shelf of the kitchen dresser. That key was 
seldom used for relatives, except at Christ- 
mas, or when one was dead. The room was 
always sombre. Light filtered into it through 
curtains of wire gauze, fixed in the window by 
mahogany frames. Over the door by which 
you entered was the picture of an uncle, too 
young and jolly for that serious position, I 
thought then, with his careless neckcloth, and 
his cap pulled down over one eye. The gilt 
moulding was gone from a corner of the 

[S6] 



A Shipping Parish 

picture — the only flaw in the prim apartment 
— for once that portrait fell to the floor, and 
on the very day, it was guessed, that his ship 
must have foundered. 

A round table set on a central thick leg hav- 
ing a three-clawed foot was in that chamber, 
covered with a cloth on which was worked a 
picture from the story of Ruth. But only 
puzzling bits of the latter were to be seen, 
for on the circumference of the table-cover 
were books, placed at precise distances apart, 
and in the centre was a huge Bible, with a 
brass clasp. With many others my name was 
in the Bible, and my birthday, and a space 
left blank for the day of my death. Reflected 
in the pier-glass which doubled the room were 
the portraits in oils of my grandparents, look- 
ing wonderfully young, as you may have no- 
ticed is often the case in people belonging to 
ancient history, as though, strangely enough, 
people were the same in those remote days, 
except that they wore different clothes. 

I have often sat on the chair, and when 
patience had inured me to the spines of the 
area I occupied, looked at the reflections in 
the mirror of those portraits, for they seemed 
more distant so, and in a perspective accord- 
ing to their age, and became really my grand- 

[57] 



London River 

parents, in a room, properly, of another world, 
which could be seen, but was not. A room 
no one could enter any more. I remember 
a black sofa, which smelt of dust, an anti- 
macassar over its head. That sofa would 
wake to squeak tales if I stood on it to inspect 
the model of a ship in yellow ivory, resting on 
a wall-bracket above. There were many old 
shells in the polished brass fender, some with 
thick orange lips and spotted backs; others 
were spirals of mother-o'-pearl, which took 
different colours for every way you held them. 
You could get the only sound in the room by 
putting the shells to your ear. Like the 
people of the portraits, it was impossible to 
believe the shells had ever lived. The inside 
of the grate was filled with white paper, and 
the trickles of fine black dust which rested 
in its crevices would start and run stealthily 
when people walked in the next room. Over 
the looking-glass there hung a pair of im- 
mense buffalo horns, with a piece of curly 
black hair dividing them which looked like 
the skin of our retriever dog. Above the 
horns was the picture of "The Famous Tea 
Clipper Oberon, setting her Studding Sails off 
the Lizard"; but so high was the print, and 
so faint — for the picture, too, was old — that 

[58] 



A Shipping Parish 

some one grown up had to tell me all about it. 

The clipper Oberon long since sailed to the 
Isle-of-No-Land-at-All, and the room in 
which her picture hung has gone also, like 
old Dockland, and is now no more than some- 
thing remembered. The clipper's picture 
went with the wreckage, when the room was 
strewn, and I expect in that house today there 
is a photograph of a steamer with two funnels. 

Nothing conjures back that room so well as 
the recollection of a strange odour which fell 
from it when its door opened, as though some- 
thing bodiless passed as we entered. There 
was never anything in the room which alone 
could account for the smell, for it had in it 
something of the sofa, which was old and 
black, and of the lacquered tea-caddy, within 
the lid of which was the faint ghost of a 
principle indefinably ancient and rare; and 
there was in it, too, something of the shells. 
But you could never find where the smell 
really came from. I have tried, and know. 
A recollection of that strange dusky fragrance 
brings back the old room on a summer after- 
noon, so sombre that the mahogany sideboard 
had its own reddish light, so quiet that the 
clock could be heard ticking in the next room ; 
time, you could hear, going leisurely. There 

[59] 



London River 

would be a long lath of sunlight, numberless 
atoms swimming in it, slanting from a corner 
of the window to brighten a patch of carpet. 
Two flies would be hovering under the ceil- 
ing. Sometimes they would dart at a tangent 
to hover in another place. I used to wonder 
what they lived on. You felt secure there, 
knowing it was old, but seeing things did not 
alter, as though the world were established 
and content, desiring no new thing. I did not 
know that the old house, even then, quiet and 
still as it seemed, was actually rocking on the 
flood of mutable affairs; that its navigator, 
sick with anxiety and bewilderment in guid- 
ing his home in the years he did not under- 
stand, which his experience had never charted, 
was sinking nerveless at his helm. For he 
heard, when his children did not, the pre- 
monition of breakers in seas having no land- 
mark that he knew; felt the trend and push 
of new and inimical forces, and currents that 
carried him helpless, whither he would not 
go, but must, heartbroken, into the uproar and 
welter of the modern. 

I have been told that London east of the 
Tower has no history worth mentioning, and 
it is true that sixteenth-century prints show 
the town to finish just where the Dock of St. 

[60] 



A Shipping Parish 

Katherine is now. Beyond that, and only 
marshes show, with Stebonhithe Church and 
a few other signs to mark recognizable coun- 
try. On the south side the marshes were very 
extensive, stretching from the River inland 
for a considerable distance. The north shore 
was fen also, but a little above the tides was a 
low eminence, a clay and gravel cliff, that 
sea-wall which now begins below the Albert 
Dock and continues round the East Anglian 
seaboard. Once it serpentined as far as the 
upper Pool, disappearing as the wharves and 
docks were built to accommodate London's 
increasing commerce. There is no doubt, 
then, that the Lower Thames parishes are 
really young; but, when we are reminded that 
they have no history worth mentioning, it may 
be understood that the historian is simply not 
interested enough to mention it. 

So far as age goes my shipping parish can- 
not compare with a cathedral city; but an- 
tiquity is not the same as richness of experience. 
One remembers the historic and venerable 
tortoise. He is old enough, compared with 
us. But he has had nothing so varied and 
lively as the least of us can show. Most of 
his reputed three hundred years is sleep, no 
doubt, and the rest vegetables. In the experi- 

[6i] 



London River 

ence of Wapping, Poplar, Rotherhithe, Lime- 
house, and Deptford, when they really came to 
life, there was precious little sleep, and no 
vegetables worth mentioning. They were 
quick and lusty. There they stood, long knee- 
deep and busy among their fleets, sometimes 
rising to cheer when a greater adventure was 
sailing or returning, some expedition that was 
ofif to find further avenues through the 
Orient or the Americas, or else a broken craft 
bringing back tragedy from the Arctic; ship 
after ship; great captain after great captain. 
No history worth mentioning! There are 
Londoners who cannot taste the salt. Yet, 
no doubt, it is difficult for younger London 
to get the ocean within its horizon. The 
memory of the Oberon, that famous ship, is 
significant to me, for she has gone, with all her 
fleet, and some say she took Poplar's best with 
her. Once we were a famous shipping parish. 
Now we are but part of the East End of 
London. The steamers have changed us. 
The tides do not rise high enough today, and 
our shallow waters cannot make home for the 
new keels. 

But to the old home now the last of the 
sailing fleet is loyal. We have enough still 
to show what once was there; the soft grada- 

[62] 



A Shipping Parish 

tions of a ship's entrance, rising into bows and 
bowsprit, like the form of a comber at its 
limit, just before it leaps forward in collapse. 
The mounting spars, alive and braced. The 
swoop and lift of the sheer, the rich and 
audacious colours, the strange flags and for- 
eign names. South Sea schooner, whaling 
barque from Hudson's Bay, the mahogany 
ship from Honduras, the fine ships and 
barques that still load for the antipodes and 
'Frisco. Every season they diminish, but 
some are still with us. At Tilbury, where 
the modern liners are, you get wall sides 
mounting like great hotels with tier on tier 
of decks, and funnels soaring high to dominate 
the day. There the prospect of masts is a line 
of derrick poles. But still in the upper docks 
is what will soon have gone for ever from Lon- 
don, a dark haze of spars and rigging, with 
sometimes a white sail floating in it like a 
cloud. We had a Russian barquentine there 
yesterday. I think a barquentffie is the most 
beautiful of ships, the most aerial and grace- 
ful of rigs, the foremast with its transverse 
spars giving breadth and balance, and steady- ^,^<^'^' 
ing the unhindered lift skywards of main and 
mizzen poles. The model of this Russian 
ship was as memorable as a Greek statue. 

[63] 



j^f>^- '- 



London River 

It is a ship's sheer which gives loveliness to 
her model, like the waist of a lissom woman, 
finely poised, sure of herself, in profile. She 
was so slight a body, so tall and slender, but 
standing alert and illustriously posed, there 
was implied in her slenderness a rare strength 
and swiftness. And to her beauty of line 
there went a richness of colour which made 
our dull parish a notable place. She was of 
wood, painted white. Her masts were of 
pine, veined with amber. Her white hull, 
with the drenchings of the seas, had become 
shot with ultramarine shadows, as though tinc- 
tured with the virtue of the ocean. The 
verdigris of her sheathing was vivid as green 
light; and the languid dock water, the colour 
of jade, glinting round her hull, was lambent 
with hues not its own. You could believe 
there was a soft radiation from that ship's 
sides which fired the water about her, but 
faded when far from her sides, a delicate and 
faery light which soon expired. 

Such are our distinguished visitors in Dock- 
land, though now they come to us with less 
frequency. If the skipper of the Oberon 
could now look down the Dock Road from the 
corner by North Street, what he would look 
for first would be, not, I am sure, what com- 

[64] 



A Shipping Parish 

pelled the electric trams, but for the entrance 
of the East Dock and its familiar tangle of 
spars. He would not find it. The old dock 
is there, but a lagoon asleep, and but few ves- 
sels sleeping with it. The quays are vacant, 
except for the discarded lumber of ships, sun- 
dried boats, rusted cables and anchors, and a 
pile of broken davits. The older dock of the 
West India Merchants is almost the same. 
Yet even I have seen the bowsprits and jib- 
booms of the Australian packets diminish 
down the quays of the East Dock as an arcade; 
and of that West Dock there is a boy who well 
remembers its quays buried under the largess 
of the tropics and the Spanish Main, where 
now, through the colonnades of its warehouse 
supports, the vistas are empty. Once you had 
to squeeze sideways through the stacked mer- 
chandise. There were huge hogsheads of 
sugar and hillocks of coconuts. Molasses and 
honey escaped to spread a viscid carpet which 
held your feet. The casual prodigality of it 
expanded the mind. Certainly this earth 
must be a big and cheerful place if it could 
spread its treasures thus wide and deep in a 
public place under the sky. It corrected the 
impression got from the retail shops for any 
penniless youngster, with that pungent odour 

[65] 



London River 

of sugar crushed under foot, with its libations 
of syrup poured from the plenty of the sunny 
isles. Today the quays are bare and des- 
erted, and grass rims the stones of the foot- 
way, as verdure does the neglected stone 
covers in a churchyard. In the dusk of a 
winter evening the high and silent warehouses 
which enclose the mirrors of water enclose 
too an accentuation of the dusk. The water 
might be evaporating in shadows. The hulls 
of the few ships, moored beside the walls, be- 
come absorbed in the dark. Night with- 
draws their substance. What the solitary 
wayfarer sees then is the incorporeal present- 
ment of ships. Dockland expires. The 
living and sounding day is elsewhere, light- 
ing the new things on which the young are 
working. Here is the past, deep in the ob- 
scurity from which time has taken the sun, 
where only memory can go, and sees but the 
inefifaceable impression of what once was 
there. 

There is a notable building in our Dock 
Road, the Board of Trade offices, retired a 
little way from the traffic behind a screen of 
plane trees. Not much more than its parapet 
appears behind the foliage. By those offices, 
on fine evenings, I find one of our ancients, 

[66] 



A Shipping Parish 

Captain Tom Bowline. Why he favours the 
road there I do not know. It would be a 
reasonable reason, but occult. The electric 
trams and motor buses annoy him. And not 
one of the young stokers and deck-hands just 
ashore and paid off, or else waiting at a likely 
corner for news of a ship, could possibly know 
the skipper and his honourable records. 
They do not know that once, in that office, 
Tom was a famous and respected figure. 
There he stands at times, outside the place 
which knew him well, but has forgotten him, 
wearing his immemorial reefer jacket, his 
notorious tall white hat and his humorous 
trousers — short, round, substantial columns — 
with a broad line of braid down each leg. 

His face is weather-stained still, and though 
his hair is white, it has the form of its early 
black and abundant vitality. As long ago as 
1885 he landed from his last ship, and has been 
with us since, watching the landmarks go. 
^'The sea," he said to me once, ^'the sea has 
gone. When I look down this road and see it 
so empty — (the simple truth is it was noisy 
with traffic) — I feel I've overstayed my time 
allowance. My ships are firewood and 
wreckage, my owners are only funny portraits 
in offices that run ten-thousand-ton steamers, 

[67] 



London River 

and the boys are bones. Poplar? This isn't 
Poplar. I feel like Robinson Crusoe — only 
I can't find a footprint in the place." 

It is for the young to remember there is no 
decay, though change, sometimes called pro- 
gress, resembles it, especially when your work 
is finished and you are only waiting and look- 
ing on. When Captain Tom is in that mood 
we go to smoke a pipe at a dockhead. It will 
be high tide if we are in luck, and the sun will 
be going down to give our River majesty, and 
a steamer will be backing into the stream, out- 
ward bound. The quiet of a fine evening for 
Tom, and the great business of ships and the 
sea for me. We see the steamer's captain 
and its pilot leaning over the bridge, looking 
aft towards the River. I think the size of 
their vessel is a little awful to Tom. He 
never had to guide so many thousand tons of 
steel and cargo into a crowded waterway. 
But those two young fellows above know noth- 
ing of the change; they came with it. They 
are under their spell, thinking their world, as 
once Tom did his, established and permanent. 
They are keeping easy pace with the move- 
ment, and so do not know of it. Tom, now at 
rest, sitting on a pierhead bollard, sees the 
world leaving him, going ahead past his cogi- 

[68] 



A Shipping Parish 

tating tobacco smoke. Let it go. We, watch- 
ing quietly from our place on the pier-head, 
are wiser than the moving world in one re- 
spect. We know it does not know whence 
it is moving, nor why. Well, perhaps its pre- 
siding god, who is determined the world shall 
go round, would be foolish to tell us. 

The sun has dropped behind the black 
serration of the western city. Now the River 
with all the lower world loses substance, be- 
comes vaporous and unreal. Moving so fast 
then? But the definite sky remains, a hard 
dome of glowing saffron based on thin girders 
of iron clouds. The heaven alone is trite and 
plain. The wharves, the factories, the ships, 
the docks, all the material evidence of hope 
and industry, merge into a dim spectral show 
in which a few lights burn, fumbling with 
ineffectual beams in dissolution. Out on the 
River a dark body moves past; it has bright 
eyes, and hoots dismally as it goes. 

There is a hush, as though at sunset the 
world had really resolved, and had stopped 
moving. But from the waiting steamer 
looming over us, a gigantic and portentous 
bulk, a thin wisp of steam hums from a pipe, 
and hangs across the vessel, a white wraith. 
Yet the hum of the steam is too subdued a 

[69] 



London River 

sound in the palpable and oppressive dusk to 
be significant. Then a boatswain's pipe rends 
the heavy dark like the gleam of a sword, and 
a great voice, awed by nothing, roars from the 
steamer's bridge. There is a sudden com- 
motion, we hear the voice again, and answer- 
ing cries, and by us, towards the black chasm 
of the River in which hover groups of moving 
planets, the mass of the steamer glides, its pale 
funnel mounting over us like a column. Out 
she goes, turning broadside on, a shadow 
sprinkled with stars, then makes slow way 
down stream, a travelling constellation occult- 
ing one after another all the fixed lights. 

Captain Tom knocks out his pipe on the 
heel of his boot, his eyes still on the lights of 
the steamer. ''Well," says Tom, ''they can 
still do it. They don't want any help old 
Tom could give aboard her. A good man 
there. Where's she bound for, I wonder?" 

Now who could tell him that? What a 
question to ask me. Did Tom ever know his 
real destination? Not he! And have I not 
watched Dockland itself in movement under 
the sun, easily mobile, from my window in 
its midst? Whither was it bound? Why 
should the old master mariner expect the 
young to answer that? He is a lucky navi- 

[70] 



A Shipping Parish 

gator who always finds his sky quite clear, and 
can set his course by the signs of unclouded 
heavenly bodies, and so is sure of the port to 
which his steering will take him. 



[71] 



IV. The Heart's Desire 



IV. The Heart's Desire. 

IF the evening was one of those which seem 
longer than usual but still have far to go, 
it was once a custom in Millwall to find 
a pair of boots of which it could be claimed 
that it was time they were mended, and to 
carry the artful parcel around to Mr. Pascoe. 
His cobbler's shop was in a street that had the 
look of having retired from the hurry and 
press of London, aged, dispirited, and indif- 
ferent even to its defeat, and of waiting va- 
cantly for what must come to elderly and 
shabby despondence. Each grey house in the 
street was distinguished but by its number and 
the ornament which showed between the mus- 
lin curtains of its parlour window. The 
home of the Jones's had a geranium, and so 
was different from one neighbour with a 
ship's model in gypsum, and from the other 
whose sign was a faded photograph askew in 
its frame. On warm evenings some of the 
women would be sitting on their doorsteps, 
watching with dull faces their children at 
play, as if experience had told them more than 

[75] 



London River 

they wanted to know, but that they had nothing 
to say about it. Beyond this street there was 
emptiness. It ended, literally, on a blind 
wall. It was easy for a wayfarer to feel in 
that street that its life was caught. It vvas 
secluded from the main stream, and its chil-, 
dren were a lively yet merely revolving eddy. 
They could not get out. When I first vis- 
ited Mr. Pascoe, as there was no window orna- 
ment to distinguish his place from the others, 
and his number was missing, I made a mis- 
take, and went next door. Through a hole 
drilled in that wrong door a length of cord 
was pendant, with a greasy knot at its end. 
Underneath the knot was chalked ^Tull." 
I pulled. The door opened on a mass of en- 
closed night. From the street it was hard to 
see what was there, so I went inside. What 
was there might have been a cavern — narrow, 
obscure, and dangerous with dim obstruc- 
tions. Some of the shadows were darker than 
others, because the cave ended, far-off, on a 
port-light, a small square of day framed in 
black. Empty space was luminous beyond 
that cave. Becoming used to the gloom I 
saw chains and cordage hanging from the un- 
seen roof. What was faintly like the prow of 
a boat shaped near. Then out from the lum- 

[76] 



The Heart's Desire 

ber and suggestions of things a gnome ap- 
proached me. ''Y' want ole Pascoe? Nex' 
dore, guv'nor!" At that moment, in the 
square of bright day at the end of the darkness, 
the apparition of a ship silently appeared, and 
was gone again before my surprise. That 
open space beyond was London River. 

Next door, in a small room to which day 
and night were the same, Mr. Pascoe was 
always to be found bending over his bobbing 
foot, under a tiny yellow fan of gaslight 
which could be heard making a tenuous 
shrilling whenever the bootmaker looked up, 
and ceased riveting. When his head was 
bent over his task only the crown of a red and 
matured cricketing cap, which nodded in 
time to his hammer, was presented to you. 
When he paused to speak, and glanced up, he 
showed a face that the gas jet, with the aid of 
many secluded years, had tinctured with its 
own artificial hue, a face puckered through a 
long frowning intent on old boots. He wore 
an apron that had ragged gaps in it. He was 
a frail and dingy little man, and might never 
have had a mother, but could have been born 
of that dusty workroom, to which he had been 
a faithful son all his life. It was a murky 
interior shut in from the day, a litter of petty 

{.771 



London River 

tools and nameless rubbish on a ruinous bench, 
a disorder of dilapidated boots, that mean gas 
jet, a smell of leather; and there old Pascoe's 
hammer defiantly and rapidly attacked its 
circumstances, driving home at times, and all 
unseen, more than those rivets. If he rose to 
rake over his bench for material or a tool, he 
went spryly, aided by a stick, but at every 
step his body heeled over because one leg was 
shorter than the other. Having found what 
he wanted he would wheel round, with a 
strange agility that was apparently a conse- 
quence of his deformity, continuing his dis- 
course, and driving his points into the air with 
his hammer, and so hobble back, still talking; 
still talking through his funny cap, as his 
neighbours used to say of him. At times he 
convoluted aerial designs and free ideas with 
his hammer, spending it aloft on matters 
superior to boots. The boots were never no- 
ticed. Pascoe could revivify his dust. The 
glitter of his spectacles when he looked up 
might have been the sparkling of an ardent 
vitality suppressed in his little body. 

The wall space of his room was stratified 
with shelves, where half-seen bottles and non- 
descript lumps were to be guessed at, like 
fossils embedded in shadow. They had never 

[78] 



The Heart's Desire 

been moved, and they never would be. 
Hanging from a nail on one shelf was a 
framed lithograph of the ship Euterpe^ ofif S. 
Catherine's Point, July 21, 1849. On the 
shelf below the picture was a row of books. I 
never saw Pascoe look at them, and they could 
have been like the bottles, retained by a care- 
ful man because of the notion that some day 
they would come in handy. Once, when 
waiting for Pascoe, who was out getting a 
little beer, I glanced at the volumes, and 
supposed they bore some relation to the pic- 
ture of the ship ; perhaps once they had been 
owned by that legendary brother of Pascoe's, 
a sailor, of whom I had had a misty apprehen- 
sion. It would be difficult to say there had 
been a direct word about him. There were 
manuals on navigation, seamanship, and ship- 
building, all of them curiosities, in these later 
days, rather than expert guides. They were 
full of marginal notes, and were not so dusty 
as I had expected to find them. The rest of 
the books were of journeys in Central Amer- 
ica and Mexico : Three Years in Guatemala; 
The Buried Cities of Yucatan; Scenes on the 
Mosquito Coast; A Voyage to Honduras. 
There was more of it, and of that sort. They 
were by authors long forgotten; but those 

[79] 



London River 

books, too, looked as though they were often 
in use. Certainly they could not be classed 
with the old glue-pots and the lumber. 

It was long after my first visit to Pascoe 
that he referred to those books. ''Somebody 
told me," he said one evening, while offering 
me a share of his beer, ''that you have been to 
the American tropics." 

I told him I could say I had been, but little 
more. I said it was a very big world. 

"Yes," he said, after a pause: "and what a 
world. Think of those buried cities in Yuca- 
tan — lost in the forest, temples and gods and 
everything. Men and women there, once up- 
on a time, thinking they were a fine people, 
the only great people, with a king and prin- 
cesses and priests who made out they knew the 
mysteries, and what God was up to. And 
there were processions of girls with fruit and 
flowers on feast-days, and soldiers in gold ar- 
mour. All gone, even their big notions. 
Their god hasn't got even a name now. Have 
you ever read the Companions of Columbus?'^ 

I was as surprised as though one of his dim 
bottles in the shadows had suddenly glowed 
before my eyes, become magical with 
moving opalescence. What right had old 
Pascoe to be staring like that to the land and 

[80] 



The Heart's Desire 

romance of the Toltecs? I had been under 
the impression that he read nothing but the 
Bible and Progress and Poverty. There was 
a biography of Bradlaugh, too, which he 
would quote copiously, and his spectacles 
used fairly to scintillate over that, and his 
yellow face to acquire a new set of cunning 
and ironic puckers; for I believe he thought, 
when he quoted Bradlaugh — whose name was 
nearly all I knew of that famous man — that 
he was becoming extremely modern, and a 
little too strong for my conventional and sen- 
sitive mind. But here he was, telling of In- 
cas, Aztecs, and Toltecs, of buried cities, of 
forgotten treasures, though mainly of the 
mind, of Montezuma, of the quetzal bird, and 
of the vanished splendour of nations that are 
now but a few weathered stones. It was the 
forlorn stones, lost in an uninhabited wilder- 
ness, to which he constantly returned. A 
brother of his, who had been there, perhaps 
had dropped a word once into Pascoe's ear 
while his accustomed weapon was uplifted 
over a dock-labourer's boot-heel, and this was 
what that word had done. Pascoe, with a 
sort of symbolic gesture, rose from his bob- 
bing foot before me, tore the shoe from it, 
flung it contemptuously on the floor, and 

[8i] 



London River 

approached me with a flamboyant hammer, 
And that evening 1 feared for a moment 
that Pascoe was spoiled for me. He had ad- 
mitted me to a close view of some secret 
treasured charms of his memory, and believ- 
ing that I was not uninterested, now, of course, 
he would be always displaying, for the ease 
of his soul, supposing we had a fellowship and 
a bond, his fascinating quetzals and Toltecs. 
Yet I never heard any more about them. 
There was another subject though, quite 
homely, seeing where we both lived, and 
equally absorbing for us both. He knew our 
local history, as far as our ships and house- 
flags were concerned, from John Company's 
fleet to the Macquarie, He knew, by reputa- 
tion, many of our contemporary master mar- 
iners. He knew, and how he had learned it 
was as great a wonder as though he spoke 
Chinese, a fair measure of naval architecture. 
He could discuss ships' models as some men 
would Greek drama. He would enter into 
the comparative merits of rig suitable for 
small cruising craft with a particularity 
which, now and then, gave me a feeling al- 
most akin to alarm; because in a man of Pas'- 
coe's years this fond insistence on the best fur- 
niture for one's own little ship went beyond 

[82] 



The Heart's Desire 

fair interest, and became the day-dreaming of 
romantic and rebellious youth. At that point 
he was beyond my depth. I had forgotten 
long ago, though but half Pascoe's age, what 
my ship was to be like, when I got her at last. 
Knowing she would never be seen at her moor- 
ings, I had, in a manner of speaking, posted 
her as a missing ship. 

One day I met at his door the barge-builder 
into whose cavernous loft I had stumbled on 
my first visit to Pascoe. He said it was a fine 
afternoon. He invited me in to inspect a 
figure-head he had purchased. ^'How's the 
old 'un?" he asked, jerking a thumb towards 
the bootmaker's. Then, with some amused 
winking and crafty tilting of his chin, he 
signed to me to follow him along his loft. 
He led me clean through the port-light of his 
cave, and down a length of steps outside to his 
yard on the foreshore of the Thames, where, 
among his barges hauled up for repairs, he 
paused by a formless shape covered by tar- 
paulins. 

'^IVe seen a few things in the way of boats, 
but this 'ere's a — well, what do you make of 
it?" He pulled the tarpaulin back, and dis- 
closed a vessel whose hull was nearing com- 
pletion. I did not ask if it was Pascoe's 

[83] 



London River 

work. It was such an amusing and pathetic 
surprise, that, with the barge-builder's leering 
face turned to me waiting for my guess, there 
was no need to answer. ''He reckons," said 
the barge-builder, "that he can do a bit of 
cruising about the mouth of the Thames in 
that. 'Bout all she wants now is to have a 
mast fitted, and to keep the water out, and 
she'll do." He chuckled grimly. Her lines 
were crude, and she had been built up, you 
could see, as Pascoe came across timber that 
was anywhere near being possible. Her 
strakes were a patchwork of various kinds of 
wood, though when she was tarred their 
diversity would be hidden from all but the 
searching of the elements. It was astonish- 
ing that Pascoe had done so well. It was 
still more astonishing that he should think it 
would serve. 

"I've given him a hand with it," remarked 
the barge-builder, "an' more advice than the 
old 'un 'ud take. But I dessay 'e could 
potter about with the dam' tub round about 
as far as Canvey, if 'e keeps it out of the wash 
of the steamers. He's been at this job two 
years now, and I shan't be sorry to see my 
yard shut of it. . . . Must humour the old 
boy, though. . . . Nigglin' job, mending 

[84] 



The Heart's Desire 

boots, I reckon. If I mended boots, I'd 'ave 
to let orf steam summow. Or go on the 
booze." 

I felt hurt that Pascoe had not taken me 
into his confidence, and that his ship, so far 
as I was concerned, did not exist. One Satur- 
day evening, when I called, his room was in 
darkness. Striking a match, there was his 
apron shrouding his bobbing foot. This had 
never happened before, and I turned into the 
barge-builder's. The proprietor there faced 
me silently for a moment, treasuring a jest he 
was going to give me when I was sufficiently 
impatient for it. ''Come to see whether your 
boots are done? Well, they ain't. Pascoe's 
gone. Christened his boat this morning, and 
pushed off. Gone for a trial trip. Gone 
down river." 

''Good Lord," I said, or something of the 
sort. 

"Yes," continued the barge-builder, luxu- 
riating in it, "and I've often wondered what 
name he'd give her, and he done it this morn- 
ing, in gold leaf. D'yer remember what she 
looked like? AH right. Well, 'er name is 
the Heart's Desire, and her skipper will be 
back soon, if she don't fall apart too far off." 

Her skipper was not back soon, nor that 

[85] 



London River 

day. We had no news of him the next day. 
A few women were in his workshop, when 
I called, hunting about for footwear that 
should have been repaired and returned, but 
was not. " 'Ere they are," cried one. 
'' 'Ere's young Bill's boots, and nothing done 
to 'em. The silly old fool. Why didn't 'e 
tell me 'e was going to sea? 'Ow's young 
Bill to go to school on Monday now?" The 
others found their boots, all urgently wanted, 
and all as they were when Pascoe got them. 
A commination began of light-minded crip- 
ples who took in young and innocent boots, 
promising them all things, and then treach- 
erously abandoned them, to do God knew 
what; and so I left. 

This became serious; for old Pascoe, with 
his Heart's Desire, had vanished, like his Tol- 
tecs. A week went by. The barge-builder, 
for whom this had now ceased to be a joke, 
was vastly troubled by the complete disappear- 
ance of his neighbour, and shook his head over 
it. Then a few lines in an evening paper, 
from a port on the Devon coast, looked prom- 
ising, though what they wished to convey 
was not quite clear, for it was a humorous 
paragraph. But the evidence was strong 
enough for me, and on behalf of the barge- 

[86] 



The Heart's Desire 

builder and a few others I went at once to 
that west-coast harbour. 

It was late at night when I arrived, and 
bewildering with rain, total darkness, and an 
upheaval of cobbles in by-ways that wandered 
to no known purpose. But a guide presently 
brought me to a providential window, and 
quarters in the Turk'^ Head. In my room 
I could hear a continuous murmuring, no 
doubt from the saloon bar below, and occa- 
sional rounds of hearty merriment. That 
would be the place for news, and I went 
down to get it. An oil-lamp veiled in tobacco 
smoke was hanging from a beam of a sooty 
ceiling. A congregation of longshoremen, 
visible in the blue mist and smoky light chiefly 
because of their pink masks, was packed on 
benches round the walls. They laughed 
aloud again as I went in. They were regard- 
ing with indulgent interest and a little shy 
respect an elegant figure overlooking them, 
and posed negligently again&t the bar, on the 
other side of which rested the large bust of 
a laughing barmaid. She was as amused as 
the men. The figure turned to me as I en- 
tered, and stopped its discourse at once. It 
ran a hand over its white brow and curly hair 
with a gesture of mock despair. 'Why, here 

[87] 



London River 

comes another to share our Heart's Desire, 
We can't keep the beauty to ourselves.'' 

It was young Hopkins, known to every 
reader of the Morning Despatch for his vola- 
tility and omniscience. It was certainly not 
his business to allow any place to keep its 
secrets to itself; indeed, his reputation in- 
cluding even a capacity for humour, the world 
was frequently delighted with more than the 
place itself knew even in secret. Other cor- 
respondents from London were also in the 
room. I saw them vaguely when Hopkins 
indicated their positions with a few graceful 
flourishes of his hand. They were lost in 
Hopkins's assurance of occupying superiority. 
They were looking on. "We all got here 
yesterday," explained Hopkins. "It's a fine 
story, not without its funny touches. And it 
has come jolly handy in a dull season when 
people want cheering up. We have found 
the Ancient Mariner. He was off voyaging 
again but his ship's magic was washed out by 
heavy weather. And while beer is more 
plentiful than news, we hope to keep London 
going with some wonders of the deep." 

In the morning, before the correspondents 
had begun on the next instalment of their 

[88] 



The Heart's Desire 

serial story, I saw Pascoe sitting up in a bed 
at another inn, his expenses an investment of 
the newspaper men. He was unsubdued. 
He was even exalted. He did not think it 
strange to see me there, though it was not 
difficult to guess that he had his doubts about 
the quality of the publicity he had attracted, 
and of the motive for the ardent attentions of 
his new and strange acquaintances from Lon- 
don. ^'Don't be hard on me," he begged, 
"for not telling you more in London. But 
you're so cautious and distrustful. I was 
going to tell you, but was uncertain what 
you'd say. Now I've started and you can't 
stop me. I've met a man here named Hop- 
kins, who has given me some help and advice. 
As soon as my craft is repaired, I'm off again. 
It was unlucky to meet that sou'wester in July. 
But once out of home waters, I ought to be able 
to pick up the Portuguese trade wind off 
Finisterre, and then I'm good for the Carib- 
bees. I'll do it. She should take no more 
than a fortnight to put right." 

There was no need to argue with him. The 
Hearfs Desire, a centre of attraction in the 
place, answered any doubt I had as to Pascoe's 
safety. But he was humoured. Hopkins hu- 

[89] 



London River 

moured him, even openly encouraged him. 
The Heart's Desire was destined for a great 
adventure. The world was kept in anticipa- 
tion of the second departure for this strange 
voyage to Guatemala. The Heart's Desire, 
on the edge of a ship-repairer's yard, was tink- 
ered, patched, refitted, made as right as she 
could be. The ship-repairer, the money for 
the work made certain for him, did what 
he was told, but made no comment, except 
to interrogate me curiously when I was 
about. 

A spring tide, with a southerly wind, 
brought us to a natural conclusion. An un- 
expected lift of the water washed off the 
Heart's Desire, rolled her about, and left her 
broken on the mud. I met the journalists in 
a group on their way to the afternoon train, 
their faces still reflecting the brightness of 
an excellent entertainment. Hopkins took 
me aside. "I've made it right with old Pas- 
coe. He hasn't lost anything by it, you can 
be sure of that." But I was looking for the 
cobbler, and all I wished to learn was the 
place where I was likely to find him. They 
did not know that. 

Late that evening I was still looking for 
him, and it had been raining for hours. The 

[90] 



The Heart's Desire 

streets of the village were dark and deserted. 
Passing one of the many inns, which were the 
only illumination of the village, I stumbled 
over a shadow on the cobbles outside. In 
the glow of a match I found Pascoe, drunk, 
with his necessary stick beside him, broken. 



[91] 



V. The Master 



V. The Master 



THIS master of a ship I remember first 
as a slim lad, with a shy smile, and 
large hands that were lonely beyond 
his outgrown reefer jacket. His cap was 
always too small for him, and the soiled frontal 
badge of his line became a coloured button 
beyond his forelock. He used to come home 
occasionally — and it was always when we were 
on the point of forgetting him altogether. He 
came with a huge bolster in a cab, as though 
out of the past and nowhere. There is a 
tradition, a book tradition, that the boy ap- 
prenticed to the sea acquires saucy eyes, and 
a self-reliance always ready to dare to that 
bleak extreme the very thought of which 
horrifies those who are lawful and cautious. 
They know better who live where the ships are. 
He used to bring his young shipmates to see us, 
and they were like himself. Their eyes were 
downcast. They showed no self-reliance. 
Their shyness and politeness, when the oc- 
casion was quite simple, were absurdly in- 

[95] 



London River 

commensurate even with modesty. Their 
sisters, not nearly so polite, used to mock them. 
As our own shy lad was never with us for 
long, his departure being as abrupt and un- 
announced as his appearance, we could will- 
ingly endure him. But he was extraneous to 
the household. He had the impeding nature 
of a new and superfluous piece of furniture 
which is in the way, yet never knows it, and 
placidly stays where it is, in its wooden man- 
ner, till it is placed elsewhere. There was a 
morning when, as he was leaving the house, 
during one of his brief visits to his home, I 
noticed to my astonishment that he had grown 
taller than myself. How had that happened? 
And where? I had followed him to the door 
that morning because, looking down at his 
cap which he was nervously handling, he had 
told me he was going then to an examination. 
About a week later he announced, in a casual 
way, that he had got his master's ticket. 
After the first shock of surprise, caused by 
the fact that this information was an unex- 
pected warning of our advance in years, we 
were amused, and we congratulated him. 
Naturally he had got his certificate as master 
mariner. Why not? Nearly all the mates 
we knew got it, sooner or later. That was 

[96] 



The Master 

bound to come. But very soon after that he 
gave us a genuine surprise, and made us 
anxious. He informed us, as casually, that 
he had been appointed master to a ship; a 
very different matter from merely possessing 
the licence to command. 

We were even alarmed. This was serious. 
He could not do it. He was not the man to 
make a command for anything. A fellow 
who, not so long ago, used to walk a mile 
with a telegram because he had not the 
strength of character to face the lady clerk in 
the post office round the corner, was hardly 
the man to overawe a crowd of hard charac- 
ters gathered by chance from Tower Hill, 
socialize them, and direct them successfully 
in subduing the conflicting elements of a dif- 
ficult enterprise. Not he. But we said 
nothing to discourage him. 

Of course, he was a delightful fellow. He 
often amused us, and he did not always know 
why. He was frank, he was gentle, but that 
large vacancy, the sea, where he had spent 
most of his young life, had made him — well, 
slow. You know what I mean. He was 
curiously innocent of those dangers of great 
cities which are nothing to us because w^e 
know they are there. Yet he w^as always on 

[97] 



London River 

the alert for thieves and parasites. I think 
he enjoyed his belief in their crafty omnipres- 
ence ashore. Proud of his alert and knowing 
intelligence, he would relate a long story of 
the way he had not only frustrated an artful 
shark, but had enjoyed the process in perfect 
safety. That we, who rarely went out of 
London, never had such adventures, did not 
strike him as worth a thought or two. He 
never paused in his merriment to consider 
the strange fact that to him, alone of our 
household, such wayside adventures fell. 
With a shrewd air he would inform us that 
he was about to put the savings of a voyage 
into an advertised trap which a country par- 
son would have stepped over without a sec- 
ond contemptuous glance. 

He took his ship away. The affair was 
not discussed at home, though each of us gave 
it some private despondency. We followed 
him silently, apprehensively, through the re- 
ports in the Shipping Gazette. He made 
point after point safely — St. Vincent, Gib- 
raltar, Suez, Aden — after him we went across 
to Colombo, Singapore, and at length we 
learned that he was safe at Batavia. He had 
got that steamer out all right. He got her 

[98] 



The Master 

home again, too. After his first adventure 
as master he made voyage after voyage with no 
more excitement in them than you would find 
in Sunday walks in a suburb. It was plain 
luck; or else navigation and seamanship were 
greatly overrated arts. 

A day came when he invited me to go with 
him part of his voyage. I could leave the 
ship at Bordeaux. I went. You must re- 
member that we had never seen his ship. 
And there he was, walking with me to the 
dock from a Welsh railway station, a man 
in a cheap mackintosh, with an umbrella I 
will not describe, and he was carrying a brown 
paper parcel. He was appropriately crowned 
with a bowler hat several sizes too small for 
him. Glancing up at his profile, I actually 
wondered whether the turmoil was now going 
on in his mind over that confession which 
now he was bound to make; that he was not 
the master of a ship, and never had been. 

There she was, a bulky modern freighter, 
full of derricks and time-saving appliances, 
and her funnel lording it over the neighbour- 
hood. The man with the parcel under his 
arm led me up the gangway. I was not yet 
convinced. I was, indeed, less sure than ever 

[99] 



London River 

that he could be the master of this huge com- 
munity of engines and men. He did not 
accord with it. 

We were no sooner on deck than a man in 
uniform, grey-haired, with a seamed and 
resolute face, which any one would have rec- 
ognized at once as a sailor's, approached us. 
He was introduced as the chief officer. He 
had a tale of woe: trouble with the dock- 
master, with the stevedores, with the cargo, 
with many things. He did not appear to 
know what to do with them. He was asking 
this boy of ours. 

The skipper began to speak. At that mo- 
ment I was gazing at the funnel, trying to 
decipher a monogram upon it; but I heard 
a new voice, rapid and incisive, sure of its 
subject, resolving doubts, and making the 
crooked straight. It was the man with the 
brown paper parcel. That was still under his 
arm — in fact, the parcel contained pink py- 
jamas, and there was hardly enough paper. 
The respect of the mate was not lessened by 
this. 

The skipper went to gaze down a hatch- 
way. He walked to the other side of the ship, 
and inspected something there. Conned her 
length, called up in a friendly but authorita- 

[loo] 



The Master 

tive way to an engineer standing by an amid- 
ship rail above. He came back to the mate, 
and with an easy precision directed his will 
on others, through his deputy, up to the time 
of sailing. He beckoned to me, who also, 
apparently, was under his august orders, and 
turned, as though perfectly aware that in this 
place I should follow him meekly, in full 
obedience. 

Our steamer moved out at midnight, in a 
drive of wind and rain. There were bewil- 
dering and unrelated lights about us. Per- 
emptory challenges were shouted to us from 
nowhere. Sirens blared out of dark voids. 
And there was the skipper on the bridge, the 
lad who caused us amusement at home, with 
this confusion in the dark about him, and an 
immense insentient mass moving with him at 
his will; and he had his hands in his pockets, 
and turned to tell me what a cold night it 
was. The pier-head searchlight showed his 
face, alert, serene, with his brows knitted in 
a little frown, and his underlip projecting as 
the sign of the pride of those who look direct 
into the eyes of an opponent, and care not at 
all. In my berth that night I searched for a 
moral for this narrative, but went to sleep 
before I found it. 

[roil 



VI. The Ship-Runners 



VI. The Ship-Runners 



THE Negro Boy tavern is known by 
few people in its own parish, for it 
is a house with nothing about it to 
distinguish its fame to those who do not know 
that a man may say to his friend, when their 
ships go different ways out of Callao, ''I 
may meet you at the Negro Boy some day." 
It is in a road which returns to the same point, 
or near to it, after a fatiguing circuit of the 
Isle of Dogs. No part of the road is better 
than the rest. It is merely a long road. 
That day when I first heard of Bill Purdy I 
was going to the tavern hoping to meet Mac- 
andrew, Chief of the Medea. His ship was 
in again. But there was nobody about. 
There was nothing in sight but the walls, 
old, sad, and discreet, of the yards where ships 
are repaired. The dock warehouses opposite 
the tavern offered me their high backs in a 
severer and apparently an endless obduracy. 
The Negro Boy, as usual, was lost and for- 

[105] 



London River 

lorn, but resigned to its seclusion from the 
London that lives, having stood there long 
enough to learn that nothing can control the 
ways of changing custom. Its windows were 
modest and prim in green curtains. Its only 
adornment was the picture, above its prin- 
cipal door, of what once was a negro boy. 
This picture now was weathered into a faded 
plum-coloured suit and a pair of silver shoe- 
buckles — there was nothing left of the boy 
himself but the whites of his eyes. The 
tavern is placed where men moving in the new 
ways of a busy and adventurous world would 
not see it, for they would not be there. Its 
dog Ching was asleep on the mat of the por- 
tico to the saloon bar; a Chinese animal, in 
colour and mane resembling a lion whose 
dignity has become suUenness through diminu- 
tion. He could doze there all day, and 
never scare away a chance customer. None 
would come. But men who had learned to 
find him there through continuing to trade to 
the opposite dock, would address him with 
some familiar and insulting words, and stride 
over him. 

The tavern is near one of the wicket gates of 
the irregular intrusion into the city of a maze 
of dock basins, a gate giving those who know 

[1 06] 



The Ship-Runners 

the district a short cut home from the ships 
and quays; the tavern was sited not altogether 
without design. And there came Macandrew 
through that gate, just as I had decided I 
must try again soon. His second, Hanson, 
was with him. They crossed to the public- 
house, and we stooped over the yellow lump 
of Chinese apathy to talk to him, and went 
through the swing doors into the saloon. 
The saloon was excluded from the gaze of the 
rest of the house by little swinging screens of 
frosted glass above the bar, for that was where 
old friends of the landlord met, who had 
known him all the time their house-flags had 
been at home in the neighbouring docks; and 
perhaps had even sailed with him when he 
himself went to sea. A settee in red plush, 
salvage from the smoke-room of a liner, ran 
round the walls, with the very mahogany 
tables before it which it knew when afloat. 
Some men in dingy uniforms and dungarees 
were at the tables. Two men I did not know 
stood leaning over the bar talking confiden- 
tially across it to a woman who was only a 
laugh, for she was hidden. One of the men 
turned from the counter to see who had come 
in. 

^'Hullo Mac," he cried, in a voice hearty 

[107] 



London River 

with the abandon of one who, perhaps, had 
been there long enough; ''look here, here's 
Jessie says she's going to leave us." 

A woman's hand, spoiled by many heavy 
rings, moved across the counter and shook his 
arm in warning. The youngster merely 
closed his own hand over it. ''Isn't it hard. 
Really going to forsake us. Won't mix your 
whiskey or uncork my lemonade any more. 
What are we going to do when we come home 
now?" 

There was an impatient muttering beyond 
him, and he made public a soothing and ex- 
aggerated apology. All the men in the room, 
even the group bent over a diagram of a 
marine engine they had drawn in chalk on 
their table, looked up in surprise, first at the 
youngster who had raised his voice, and then 
to watch the tall shadow of a woman pass 
quickly down the counter-screen and vanish. 
Still laughing, the young man, with his uni- 
form cap worn a little too carelessly, nodded to 
the company, and went out with his compan- 
ion. 

Macandrew stared in contempt at the back 
of the fellow as he went. "A nice boy that. 
Too bright and bonny for my ship. What's 
that he was saying about Jessie?" He tried 

[io8] 



The Ship-Runners 

to see where she was, and lowered his voice. 
'^I know his kind. I saw them together last 
night, in the Dock Road. What does she have 
anything to do with him for? We know her 
of course . . . but even then. . . . She's 
really not a bad sort. She's like that with all 
those young dogs. Can't help it, I suppose." 

He moved to the bar, a massive figure, 
beyond the age of a sea-going engineer, but 
still as light on his feet as a girl. ^Where's 
she gone?" He pushed open one of the little 
glass screens, and put his petulant face, with 
its pale eyes set like aquamarines in bronze, 
into an opening too small to frame it. '^Can 
you see her, Hanson?" 

Hanson winked at me, adjusted the spec- 
tacles on his nose, and grinned. With that 
grin, and his spectacles, he was as surprising 
as a handsome gargoyle. His height com- 
pelled him to lean forward and to grin down- 
ward, even when speaking to a big man like 
Macandrew. He turned to his chief now, 
and both hands went up to his spectacles. In 
the way the corners of his mouth turned up 
before he spoke, whimsically wrinkling his 
nose, and in his intent and amused regard, 
there was a suggestion of the mockery of a 
low immortal for beings who are fated earn- 

[109] 



London River 

estly to frustrate themselves. His grin gave 
you the uncomfortable feeling that it was 
useless to pretend you were keeping nothing 
from him. 

''Here goes," said Hanson. "Never mind 
Jessie. I've got something to tell you, Chief. 
I'm leaving you this voyage." 

Macandrew was instantly annoyed. ''Go- 
ing? Dammit, you can't. Look at the crowd 
I've got now. You mustn't do it." 

"I must. They are a thin lot, but you 
could push the old Medea along with anything. 
I've got another ship. My reason is very 
good, from the way I look at it." 

Hanson turned his grin to me. He was 
going to enjoy the privilege of seeing his 
reasons deemed unreasonable. "Don't think 
it's a better job I've got. It's worse. It's a 
very rummy voyage. We may complete it, 
with luck. It's a boat-running lunacy, and 
some mining gear. She's called the Cygnet, 
I've been over her, and we shall call her 
something different before we see the last of 
her." 

"Then why are you going?" I asked him. 

"To see what will happen. ..." 

Macandrew interrupted him. "What? And 

[no] 



The Ship-Runners 

you next on the list for Chief? You're roman- 
tic, young man, and that means you're no 
engineer. Is there a lot of money in it?" 

''There isn't, but there's some life. I want 
to know what I'm made of. Shall I ever learn 
it under you? Down below in the Medea is 
like winding up a clock and going to sleep. 
Do you know the Cygnet has six inches of 
freeboard?" He was talking to me, but kept 
glancing sideways to see what effect this had 
on Macandrew. But Macandrew's broad 
back was impassive. 

''Six inches of freeboard, barring her false 
bulwarks of deal boards, and she's going out 
to — I forget the name of the place, but I 
could show you where it is within a hundred 
miles on a map that doesn't give its name. 
It's up the Pondurucu." 

Macandrew made no sign, and Hanson, his 
humour a little damped, spoke more seriously. 
"I don't think she'll ever get there, but it 
will be interesting to see where she stops, and 
why." 

Macandrew heaved round on his junior. 
"There's drivel. It sounds well from an 
engineer and a mathematician, doesn't it?" 
He turned away again. "Supposing," he said, 

[III] 



London River 

over his shoulder, "supposing you pull this 
ship through all right, then where will you be? 
Any better off?" 

'^I think so," said Hanson. He couldn't 
talk to Macandrew's back, so he bent over me 
and pointed a challenging finger at my necktie. 
''I've never risked anything yet, not even my 
job. This is where I do it. It'll be nice to 
attempt something when the odds are that you 
can't finish it, and there's nothing much in it 
if you do. ''Why," he said, grinning at his 
Chief's back, "if I were to stay with him I'd 
become so normal that I'd slip into marriage 
and safety as a matter of course, and have to 
give up everything." 

"Who's in charge of this lunacy?" asked 
Macandrew. His voice was a little truculent. 

"All right. Chief. I shan't remember his 
name any the better because you're annoyed 
with me. I haven't seen the skipper yet. I 
think I heard him called Purdy." 

"Purdy? Bill Purdy?" Macandrew was 
incredulous. "Do you know what you've let 
yourself in for? If Purdy's got the job, I 
know why. Nobody else would take it, and 
he's the last man, anyway, who ought to have 



it." 



"What, drink?" asked Hanson. 

[112] 



The Ship-Runners 

'Xord, no. Not Purdy. No. It's the 
man himself. I've known him a long time, 
and I like him, but he'll never do. He can't 
make up his mind to a course. Don't you 
remember the Campeachy case? I expect it 
was before your time. Purdy had her. He 
was coming up-Channel, and got nervous over 
the weather, and put into Portland for a pilot. 
There was no pilot. So he decided to put 
out again and go on. It never occurred to 
him that as he was in shelter he'd better stay 
there till a pilot arrived, because getting out 
of that was exactly when he'd want one. He 
put her ashore. That was like Purdy, to play 
for safety and make a wreck. When he got 
over the fuss Lloyd's raised about it he re- 
fused to take command again for some time. 
He couldn't even make up his mind whether 
he wanted a ship at all." 

Hanson listened to this with the air of one 
who was being reassured in a doubtful enter- 
prise. 

^'You mistake me. Chief," he said. '^You 
are only improving my reasons for going. 
Not only is the ship crank, but so is her skip- 
per. Now tell me . . ." 

Macandrew frowned at his junior, and his 
curiously pale eyes became distinctly inhuman. 

[113] 



London River 

I believe he thought his counsel was being 
laughed at. But the door opened, and he 
touched Hanson's arm. A little man of mid- 
dle age stood there, who turned, and actually 
prevented the doors from swinging together 
with their usual announcement of another 
customer. For only a moment he raised his 
downcast eyes to see who was there, and then 
nodded sadly to Macandrew. His drooping 
moustache conformed to the downward lines 
of his face, which was that of a man who had 
been long observing life with understanding, 
and had not a lively opinion of it. 

Macandrew's demeanour changed. It was 
now mild and almost affectionate as he greeted 
the little man. ''Come over here, Purdy, and 
tell us what you've been doing. Here's Han- 
son, this young fellow. I hear he's sailing 
with you. He's your Chief. You'd better 
know him." 

Purdy raised his eyes in a grave and mo- 
mentary survey, made to shake hands with 
Hanson, but hesitated, and did so only because 
Hanson put out his own great fist with de- 
cision. Purdy did not speak, except to say to 
Hanson: 'We're signing-on tomorrow. I'll 
meet you at the shipping office then." He 
seemed to forget the pair of them, paused, and 

[1 14] 



The Ship-Runners 

went to a far vacant corner of the bar. The 
barmaid, as he got there, returned, and stopped 
to say something to him. 

''Well, I'm damned," muttered Macandrew. 
"Look here, Jessie," he cried, "here's all us 
young men been waiting for nearly twenty 
minutes, and you take no notice of us, but as 
soon as a captain looks across the counter, there 
you are. But how did you know he was a 
captain? That's what I'd like to know. 
He's only wearing a bowler hat." 



The Medea had been ordered unexpectedly 
to Barry for loading, to take the place of an 
unready sister-ship; and Macandrew, of whom 
I have had much experience, would be active, 
critical of what a dog must put up with in life, 
and altogether unfit for intimate, amiable, and 
reminiscent conversation. Yet I wanted to see 
him again before he left, and went past the 
Board of Trade Office hoping for signs of the 
Medea, for I had heard she was assembling 
a crew that morning. But the marine-store 
shops, with their tarpaulin suits hanging out- 
side open-armed and oscillating, looked across 
to the men lounging against the shipping- 
office railings, and the idlers stared across at 

[IIS] 



London River 

the tarpaulins. It did not appear to be a 
place where anything was destined to happen. 
It merely looked like rain. 

Macandrew might be inside with his crowd 
of firemen and greasers. Behind the brass 
grille there a clerk, solitary and absorbed in 
his duties, bent over a pile of ships' articles, 
and presented to the seamen in the public 
space beyond him only the featureless shine 
of a bald head. The seamen, scattered about 
in groups, shabby and listless, with a few of 
their officers among them, were as sombre 
and subdued as though they had learned life 
had nothing more to offer them, and they were 
present only because they might as well use 
up the salvage of their days. The clerk raised 
his head and questioned the men before him 
with a quick, inclusive glance. '^Any men 
here of the Cygnet?'^ he demanded. His 
voice, raised in certainty above the casual 
murmuring of the repressed, made them all as 
self-conscious and furtive as though dis- 
covered in guilt. Hanson's head appeared 
above the crowd, as he rose from a bench and 
went to the official. ''I'm the engineer of the 
Cygnet, We're waiting for Captain Purdy." 

The clerk complained. He pulled out his 
watch. ^'He said he would be ready for me 

[ii6] 



The Ship-Runners 

at ten this morning. Now you've lost your 
turn, and there are three other ships." He 
turned away in a manner which told every 
one that Hanson had now become non-existent, 
pushed aside the Cygnefs papers, and 
searched the room once more. '^Ah, good 
morning. Captain Hudson. You ready for 
me? Then I'll take you next." The captain 
went around to stand beside the official, and 
his crew clustered on their side of the bars, 
with their caps in their hands. 

"A good start that," said Hanson to me. 
'Terhaps, after all, we never shall start. 
Must be a rum chap, that Purdy." 

He told me the Medea s crowd was 
there, but perhaps Macandrew had already 
signed, and so would not appear. That 
meant I might not see him for another year; 
but as I left the office I found him coming up 
its steps outside, and not as though there were 
the affairs of a month to be got into two days, 
but in leisurely abstraction. He might have 
been making up his mind that, after all, there 
was no need to call there, for he was studying 
each step as if he were looking for the bottom 
of a mystery. His fingers were twirling the 
little ivory pig he carries as a charm on his 
watchguard. The pig is supposed to assist 

[117] 



London River 

him when he is in a difficulty. He raised his 
eyes. 

"Anyhow," he despaired to me with irrel- 
evance, '^I can't do anything for him." 

I waited for the chance of a clue. "I 
thought," Macandrew quietly soliloquized, 
''he knew better than that. He's been a fail- 
ure, but all the same, he's got a better head 
than most of us. She's sure to bring him to 
grief." 

'What's all this about?" I ventured. 

"I've just been talking to Purdy. You re- 
member what Hanson said of that voyage he's 
making? Purdy is taking Jessie with him. 
You don't know Purdy, but I do. And I 
know Jessie; but that' s nothing." 

"Taking her with him?" I asked; "but 
how. . . ." 

"Oh, cook, of course. That'll be it. She'll 
be steward, naturally. That's reasonable. 
You've seen her. Jessie's the sort of woman 
would jump at the chance of such a pleasant 
trip, as cook." 

"I don't understand. . . ." 

"Who said you did? Nobody does but the 
pair of them. I know what another man 
might see in Purdy. But a woman! He's 
middle-aged, quiet, and looks tired. That 

[ii8] 



The Ship-Runners 

woman is young and lively, and she'll be bored 
to death with him on such a trip." 

''But I thought you said . . ." 

'What have I said? I've said nothing. 
Jessie's away to sea as cook. Why not? I'm 
going inside. Are you coming in?" 

Crossing the floor of the office, Hanson 
caught Macandrew's arm. "Your lot are 
signing-on now." The master of the M'edea 
was round with the official tallying the men by 
the ship's papers. "I see it," Macandrew 
answered. "I've signed. I wanted to catch 
the old man before he began that job." 

"We're hung up for Purdy," Hanson told 
him. "Nobody seems to know where he is." 
Hanson was amused. 

"Yes. Well . . . he'll be here all right . . . 
and now this new job which you think so 
funny, young Hanson. See it goes through. 
Presently it won't be so funny. Hang on to 
it then." 

Hanson was surprised by this, and a trifle 
hurt. He was beginning to speak, making 
the usual preliminary adjustment of his spec- 
tacles, when a movement near the door 
checked him. His hands remained at his 
glasses, as if aiding his sight to certify the un- 
believable. 

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London River 

^'What's this?" he murmured. '^Here's 
Purdy. Isn't that the Negro Boyd's barmaid 
with him ... is she with him?" He con- 
tinued to watch, apparently for some sign that 
this coincidence of his captain and a barmaid 
in a public office was designed. 
The bent gaze of the master of the Cygnet 
might have noticed the boots of his engineer, 
for he took in the room no higher than that. 
Then he came forward with his umbrella, still 
in contemplation. It might have been no 
more than a coincidence. She, too, ap- 
proached, a little behind him, but obscuring 
his dull meagreness, for she was a head taller, 
and a bold and challenging figure. Her 
blond hair distinguished her even more than 
the emphasis of her florid hat. Her pallor 
that morning refined the indubious coarseness 
of her face, and changed vulgarity into the 
attractive originality of a spirited character. 
Many there knew her, but she recognized 
nobody. She yawned once, in a fair piece of 
acting, and in her movements and the poise of 
her head there was a disdain almost plain 
enough to be insolence. Purdy turned to her, 
and the strange pair conferred. I heard 
Hanson say to himself: ''What on earth." 
She left Purdy, bent her head with a gracious 

[120] 



The Ship-Runners 

but stressed smile to Macandrew, and went to 
the bench by the wall, where she sat, waiting, 
with her legs crossed in a way that was a 
defiance and an attraction in such a place, 
where a woman is rarely seen. She read a 
newspaper, perhaps because that acted as a 
screen, though she turned its pages with a 
nervous abruptness which betrayed her im- 
itation of indifference. 



The Medea and the Cygnet, and the other 
ships I knew which carried those whose for- 
tunes were some concern of mine, might have 
sailed over the edge of the world. My only 
communication was with an occasional fam- 
iliar name in the reports of the Shipping List, 
Then Macandrew came home again. But it 
was difficult to meet him. Mrs. Macandrew 
told me he was working by his ship in dry- 
dock. They had had trouble with the engines 
that voyage, and she herself had seen little of 
him, except to find him, when she came down 
of a morning, asleep in the drawing-room. 
Just flung himself down in the first place, 
you know. In those greasy overalls, too. He 
had told her the engine-room looked like a 

[121] 



London River 

scrap-heap, but the ship had to be ready for 
sea in ten days. Once he had worked thirty- 
two hours on end. Think of that, and he had 
not been home for six months. She would 
strongly advise any girl not to marry a man 
who went to sea, and if I met Macandrew I 
was to bring him home at once. Did I hear? 

When I found the Medea it was late in the 
day, for she was not in the dry-dock that had 
been named. Her Chief had just gone ashore. 
There was a chance that he would have called 
at the Negro Boy, but he had not been seen 
there. Except for the landlord, who was at a 
table talking to a stranger, the saloon was 
empty. A silk hat was on the table before 
the stranger, beside a tankard, and the hat 
was surmounted by a pair of neatly folded 
kid gloves. '^Come over here," said the 
landlord. ''Sit here for a bit, Macandrew 
may come in. This is Dr. Maslin." A mon- 
ocle fell its length of black cord from the 
doctor's eye, and he nodded to me. 

''The doctor used to be with me when I 
was running out East," explained the landlord. 
"Where did you say you had come from now. 
Doctor? Oh, yes, Tabacol. Funny name. 
I was never on the South American coast. 
After I left you sick at Macassar, the last trip 

[122] 



The Ship-Runners 

we had together — the old Siwalik — I left the 
sea to younger men. But there you are, 
Doctor. Still at it. Why don't you give it 
up?" 

The doctor did not answer, except to make 
a bubbling noise in his tankard. He placed it 
on the table again delicately and deliberately, 
and wiped his grizzled moustache with a 
crimson silk handkerchief. He put up his 
monocle, and seemed to be intently inspecting 
a gas globe over the counter. I thought his 
grimace in this concentration came from an 
effort to reinforce his will against all curiosity 
on our part. But it appeared he was really 
looking at what showed, at an angle, of a 
portrait on the wall of an inner room. He 
could just see it, from where he sat. Anyhow, 
the landlord imagined it was the portrait 
which had caught his friend's interest. 
'^Looking at that crayon portrait. Doctor? Ah, 
showy woman, isn't she? Used to be barmaid 
here. The Lord knows where she is now. 
Went to sea, like a fool. Stewardess, or 
something worse. Much more useful here." 

The doctor's seamed face, sour and ironic, 
made it impossible to know whether his ex- 
pression was one of undisguised boredom, or 
only his show of conventional politeness. I 

[123] 



London River 

began to feel I had broken into the intimacy 
of two men whose minds were dissimilar, but 
friendly through old associations, and that the 
doctor's finer wit was reproving me for an 
intrusion. So I rose, and asked indifferently 
what sort of a place was Tabacol. Had he 
been there before? 

''Never," said the doctor, ''nor is it the kind 
of place one wishes to see twice. We were 
kept at Tabacol because so many of our men 
were down with fever. It is a little distance 
up the Pondurucu River . . . maybe two 
hundred miles. Did you say . . . ? No. 
It is not really out of the way. An ocean 
steamer calls at Tabacol once a month or six 
weeks. It is only on the edge of what roman- 
tic people call the unknown." 

It was evident he thought I could be one of 
the romantic. He looked at me for the first 
time, twisting the cord of his eyeglass with his 
finger and thumb in a fastidious way, and I 
thought his glance was to dissipate some doubt 
he had that he ought to be speaking to me at 
all. He dropped the cord suddenly as if 
letting go his reserve, and said slyly, with a 
grave smile: "Perhaps the romantic think the 
unknown is worth looking into because it may 
be better than what they know. At Tabacol I 

[124] 



The Ship-Runners 

used to think the unknown country beyond it 
looked even duller than usual. There was a 
forest, a river, a silence, and it was either day 
or night. That was all. If the voice of Na- 
ture is the voice of God. . . ." 

The landlord was observing in surprise this 
conversational excursion by his old friend, as 
if it were altogether new to him. He laughed 
aloud, and, putting a consoling hand on his 
friend's shoulder as he rose, he told us he 
must leave us for a few minutes, for he had 
business. ^Took more cheerful before I get 
back. Doctor." 

The doctor chuckled, and stretched across 
to give his gloves a more satisfactory position 
on his hat. ''I don't understand what it can 
be that attracts people to such a place. Young 
men, maybe yourself even, wish to go there. 
Isn't that so? Yes. I've met such men in 
such places. Then they did not give me the 
impression that they were satisfied with their 
romance. Impossible, of course. Romance 
is never in the place unless we put it there, 
and who would put even a sentimental dream 
into such a hole as Tabacol? Tropical 
squalor. Broken people! I've never seen 
romance in such a place, and don't expect 
to. . . ." 

[125] 



London River 

Several cabs, on their way to a ship outward 
bound, made an increasing noise in the night, 
rattled by on the cobbles outside, their occu- 
pants roaring a sentimental chorus, and 
drowned what the doctor was saying. 

''. . . folly. Worse than folly." He was 
holding his gloves now, and was lightly flick- 
ing the edge of the table with them in place 
of verbal emphasis. He suddenly regarded 
me again as if he strongly suspected me of 
being his antipathy. 'Who but a fool would 
take a woman to such a country as that? Any 
romantic sentimentalist, I suppose. I forget 
the name of the ship. There was, you might 
say, hardly sufficient room to paint a name on 
her. She was no more than a tug. It was a 
miracle she survived to get there at all, for 
she had crossed from England. Crossed the 
Western ocean in such a craft, and brought a 
woman with him. Did ever you hear of such 
folly?" 

Now I was certain of our whereabouts, and 
felt a weak inclination to show an elder that I, 
too, knew something about it; but when I 
leaned forward eagerly and was about to speak, 
the doctor screwed in that devastating mon- 
ocle, and I felt I was only a curious example 

[126] 



The Ship-Runners 

of the sort of thing he especially disliked. For 
a minute, in which I wondered if I had quite 
stopped his guarded flow, he said no more. 
Then he addressed his eyeglass to a panel of 
the partition, and flicked his gloves at that. 

^'I had noticed for some days that little 
craft lying near us, but gave her no attention. 
I had sixteen men to attend to with complex- 
ions like lemons, and one died. There was 
no time to bother with other folk's troubles. 
Our skipper, one breakfast-time, told me there 
was a woman aboard that little thing, and he'd 
been asked whether I'd go over. She was ill. 

^'I've seen some queer packets of misery 
at sea, but never one that touched that ship. 
Her skipper seemed a regular fool. I had to 
ask him to speak up, for he mumbled like a 
boy who has been caught out, and knows it 
is useless to pretend. I learned from him that 
he was only just beginning his voyage. You 
understand? He was just beginning it, there. 
He was going up-river, to a point not on the 
chart. I cannot make out now whether he 
wanted to put that woman ashore to get home 
in comfort at the first opportunity, or whether 
. . . it's impossible to say. One would sooner 
believe the best of another man, with half a 

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London River 

chance. After all," said the doctor bitterly, 
^'as long as the woman survived I suppose she 
was some consolation in misery. 

"I scrambled over the deck lumber. There 
was hardly room to move. I found her in a 
cabin where she could get little seclusion from 
the crew. Hardly any privacy at all, I should 
say. As soon as I saw her I could make a 
guess . . . however, I told the fellow after- 
wards what I thought, and he gave me no 
answer. He even turned his back on me. He 
must have known well enough that that river 
was no place for any sort of white woman. 
He was condemning her perhaps to death just 
to make an ugly job more attractive. 

"I admit," said the doctor, with a sly glance, 
''that she could make it attractive, for a sort 
of man. She was wrapped in a rosy dressing- 
gown. She held it together with her hands. 
I noticed them . . . anybody might . . . they 
were covered with rings. She had character, 
too. She made me feel, the way she looked at 
me, that I was indiscreet in asking personal 
questions. I could see what was wrong with 
her. It was debility, but all the same the 
beginning of an end not far off, in that country. 
'You'll have to get out of this,' I told her. 
Can't be done. Doctor,' she said coolly. 

[128] 



U it 



The Ship-Runners 

^' ^It can. A liner for England will be here 
in another week, and you must take it.' 

'' 'I don't/ she said. She was quiet enough, 
but she seemed a very wilful woman. 'I've 
got my job here.' 

"I told her that the skipper of her ship 
would never carry out his orders, because they 
could not be carried out. I told her, what 
was perfectly true, that their craft would rot 
on a sandbar, or find cataracts, or that they'd 
all get eaten by cannibals, or die of something 
nasty. I admit I tried to frighten her. 

" 'It's no good. Doctor,' she said. 'You 
can't worry me. I've got my work to do in 
this ship, like the others.' 

" Tooh!' I said to her. 'Cooking and that. 
Anybody could do it. Let the men do it. It's 
not a woman's job.' 

" 'You're wrong,' she said. 'It's mine. 
You don't know.' 

"I began to get annoyed with this stubborn 
creature. I told her she would die, if she 
didn't leave the working of that ship to those 
who ought to do it. 

" 'Who ought?' she asked me, in a bit of a 
temper. 'I know what I have to do. I'm 
going through with it. It's no good talking. 
I'll take my chance, like the rest.' 

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London River 

''So I had to tell her that I was there because 
the master of her ship had sent for me to give 
my advice. My business was to say what she 
ought to do. 

" 'I don't want to be told. I know,' she 
said. 'The captain sent for you. Talk to 
him.' 

"My temper was going, and I told her that 
it was something to know the captain himself 
had enough sense to send for me. 

" 'Look here,' she told me. 'I've had 
enough of this. I want to be alone. Thank 
you for troubling to come over.' " 

The doctor lifted his shoulders, and made 
a wry face, that might have been disdain or 
pity. 

"I was leaving her, but she called to me, 
and I went back. She held out her hand. 'I 
do thank you for troubling about me. Of 
course I do. But I want to stay on here — I 
must.' <^ 

" 'Well, you know the penalty,' I said. 'I 
was bound to tell you that.' 

" 'What of it?' she said, and laughed at me. 
'We musn't bother about penalties. Good- 
bye!' 

"I must say she made me feel that if the 
skipper of that ship had been of different 

[130] 



The Ship-Runners 

metal, she might almost have pulled him 
through. But what a man. What a man! I 
saw his miserable little figure standing not far 
from where my boat was when I was going. 
He made as if he were coming to me, and then 
stopped. I was going to take no notice of him, 
but went up and explained a thing or two. 
I'll bet he'll remember them. All he said was : 
*I was afraid you'd never change her mind,' 
and turned away. What a man ! There was 
a pair for you. I could understand him, but 
what could have been in her mind? What- 
ever made her talk like that? That's the way 
of it. There's your romance of the tropics, 
and your squalid Garden of Eden, when you 
know it. A monotonous and dreary job, and 



a woman." 



The landlord returned. The monocle fix- 
edly and significantly regarded me. ^'Have 
another. Doctor," said the landlord, pointing 
to the empty tankard. ''How long were you 
in Macassar?" The doctor turned briskly to 
his old friend, and began some chaff. 



Ferguson, who had just come into port with 
a damaged propeller shaft, was telling us how 
it was. This was his first expansive experi- 

[131] 



London River 

ence, and there could be no doubt the engine- 
room staff of the Torrington had behaved 
very well. The underwriters had recognized 
that, and handsomely, at a special meeting at 
Cornhill. Though Ferguson was young for a 
chief engineer, his professional elders, who 
were listening to him, showed some critical 
appreciation of the way he solved his problem. 
He was sitting at a table of the Negro Boy, 
drawing a diagram on it, and they stood 
round. 

^^There. That was where it was. You see 
what we had to do. It would not have been 
so bad in calm weather, but we were labouring 
heavily, all the way from Savannah. Our old 
man did not think it possible to do it. But it 
was no good waiting for something worse to 
happen." 

The matter grew too technical for me. 
There was cargo jettisoned, and ballast tanks 
emptied aft. The stern of the Torrington was 
lifted so that her propeller at intervals was 
clear. Ferguson then went overside on life- 
lines. When he was not submerged, he was 
trying to put his ship right again ; and when he 
became exhausted, one of his colleagues took 
his place, to see whether, while escaping 
drowning, he could continue the work of 

[132] 



The Ship-Runners 

salvation. They all escaped, and the Torring- 
ton put back to Tampa for repairs, which her 
own engineers accomplished. 

The demonstration was over, and Ferguson's 
story was lapsing into general gossip. The 
party of men began to dissolve. 

^'Who do you think I saw at Tampa?" 
Ferguson asked Macandrew. ''Old Purdy." 

'What?" cried Macandrew. 'Ts he alive?" 

Ferguson laughed. "Just about. What's 
he been doing? I thought he had chucked 
the sea. It was in the Customs Office. I'd 
been there to make a declaration, and in one 
of those long corridors there he stood, all 
alone, with his hat in his hand, perhaps cooling 
his head. I hardly knew him. He's more 
miserable than ever." 

"Did he say anything?" asked Macandrew. 

"About as much as usual. I didn't know 
him at first. He seemed rather ill. The 
temples of that high forehead of his were 
knotted with veins. It nearly gave me a 
headache to look at him." 

Several of us were impelled to ask a number 
of questions, but Ferguson was listening now, 
with the detachment of youth, to the end of a 
bawdy story that two men were laughing over. 
This had already displaced Purdy in his mind. 

[133] 



London River 

'^Didn't he say anything at all? Didn't he 
mention Hanson?" we asked Ferguson. 

'^Eh? What, old Purdy? I don't think so. 
I don't remember. Now you mention it, I 
think I did hear somewhere that Hanson was 
with Purdy. But I don't believe he said 
anything about him. I was just going to ask 
him to come and have a drink, when he said 
good-bye. All I know is I saw him standing 
there like a sorrowful saint. Then he walked 
off slowly down the corridor. He's a sociable 
beggar. I couldn't help laughing at him." 



There was a notice in the window of the 
Negro Boy, and I discovered that the tavern 
was under Entirely New Management. The 
picture sign over the principal door had been 
renewed. The mythical little figure which 
had given the public-house its name was no 
longer lost in the soot of half a century. He 
was now an obvious negro boy, resplendent 
in a golden coat. The reticence of the green 
window-curtains had become a bright vacancy 
of mirrors, and the tavern was modern within. 
Reform had destroyed the exclusiveness of the 
saloon bar; instead of privacy, distant mirrors 
astonished you with glimpses of your own 

[134] 



The Ship-Runners 

head which were incredible and embarrassing 
in their novelty. The table-tops were of 
white marble supported on gilded iron. The 
prints and lithographs of ships had gone from 
the walls, and were replaced by real pictures 
converted to the advertisement of various 
whiskies — pictures of battleships, bull-dogs, 
Scotsmen, and figures in armour tempted 
from their ancient posts in baronial halls, after 
midnight, to finish the precious drink forgot- 
ten by the guests. In accordance with this 
transformation the young lady in attendance 
at the bar was in neat black and white, with 
her hair as compact and precise as a resolu- 
tion at a public meeting which had been 
passed even by the women present. She was 
severe and decisive, and without rec- 
ognition of anything there but the tariff of the 
house, and sold her refreshments as in a simple 
yet exacting ritual which she despised, but 
knew to be righteous. 

It was many months since I had been there. 
Macandrew was no nearer than Rotterdam, 
and perhaps would not see London that voyage. 
There had been a long period in which change 
had been at work at the docks, even to their 
improvement, but through it all not one of my 
old friends had returned home. They had 

[135] 



London River 

approached no nearer than Falmouth, the 
Hartlepools, or Antwerp, with a slender 
chance that they would come to the Thames, 
and next we heard of them when they were 
bound outwards once more, and for a period 
known not even to their wives. The new 
Negro Boy had not the appearance of a place 
where I could expect to find a friend, and I 
was leaving it again, instantly, when a tall 
figure rose in a corner waving a reassuring 
hand. I did not recognize the man, but 
thought I knew his smile, which made me 
look at him in daiwning hope. The grin, 
evidently knowing its power, was maintained 
till I saw it indubitably as Hanson's. He 
made a remembered gesture with his specta- 
cles. '^I was just about sick of this place,'' 
he said. ^'I've waited here for an hour hop- 
ing somebody would turn up. Where's Mac- 
andrew now?" 

''In Rotterdam. I don't think he will be 
home this voyage." 

''And what's happened to this house? 
Where's the old man?" 

"You know all I know about it. I haven't 
been here for nearly a year. We must expect 
progress to make things better than they were. 
Where have you come from?" 

[136] 



The Ship-Runners 

^'I'm running between Liverpool and Balti- 
more now, in the Planets. They're comfort- 
able ships, but I don't admire the Western 
ocean. It's too savage and cold. How is 
Macandrew? I came up from Liverpool 
because I felt I must see him again. I heard 
he was here." 

From the way he talked, I thought he 
preferred those subjects requiring the least 
effort for a casual occasion. ^^Now and then," 
I had to tell him, ^'some of us have wondered 
what happened to the Cygnet.'^ 

Hanson's smile became effulgent. My re- 
mark might have reminded him of a most 
enjoyable joke, but he made no sign, while 
enjoying it privately, that he intended to share 
it with me at any time. 

^^There was a Cygnet, wasn't there?" he 
asked, when my patience had nearly gone. 
"I should like somebody to confirm it. The 
reason I came to this house tonight, to be 
candid, was just to see this room again, to 
settle a doubt I had. Didn't Macandrew 
stand over there, and show concern because a 
fair, plump woman wasn't quick enough with 
his beer?" 

I admitted this, as an encouragement. ^'But 
when I got here tonight," continued Hanson, 

[137] 



London River 

'^the change made me feel my mind had lost 
hold. I must say it's a relief to see you." 

'^Has this anything to do with the Cygnet?'' 
I asked. 

''Everything. I had the time of my life. 
I wouldn't have missed it for anything. But 
somehow, now and then, I want to be quite 
sure I had it myself, and not some other 
fellow." He beamed with the very remem- 
brance of the experience, and nodded his head 
at me. He leaned over the table to me in 
confidence. ''Have you ever been to the 
tropics? I don't mean calling at Colombo or 
Rio. I mean the back of things where there's 
a remarkable sun experimenting with low life 
and hardly anybody looking on. If ever you 
get the chance, you take it. It alters all your 
ideas of time and space. You begin to learn 
what stuff life is made of when you see a 
tropical forest, and see nothing else for months. 
On the other hand," he said, "you become 
nothing. You see it doesn't matter to others 
what happens to you, and you don't care much 
what happens to others." 

"You don't care? It doesn't matter?" I 
said in doubt to this young mathematician 
and philosopher, who had been experimenting 
with life. "Isn't that merely romantic?' 

[138] 



)ii 



The Ship-Runners 

'^Romance — romance be damned! I * got 
down to the facts." 

^ Well, get me down to them. I should like 
the facts. I want to hear what this strange 
voyage was like." 

"As you know," Hanson assured me, "I 
went out merely to see what would happen to 
myself, in certain circumstances. I knew I 
was going to be scared, and I was. There is a 
place called Tabacol on the river, and we 
anchored there after our ocean passage for 
more than a week. I don't know why, and it 
was no use asking Purdy. Probably he didn't 
know. I had made up my mind to make the 
engines move and stop, whenever ordered, and 
then see where we are. An3rway, after the 
racket of the sea voyage, when the engines 
stopped at Tabacol the utter silence was as if 
something which had been waiting there for 
you at once pounced. The quiet was of an 
awful weight. I could hardly breathe, and 
chanced to look at the thermometer. It stood 
at 132°. I don't know how I got outside, 
but when I came to I was on my back on deck, 
and Jessie was looking after me. I remember 
wondering then how a big, fleshy woman like 
her could stand it, and felt almost as sorry for 
her as I did for myself." 

[139] 



London River 

^'Did she look ill?" 

^^ Jessie? Oh, I don't know. She looked 
as if she might have been having a merrier 
time. Well, we left Tabacol, and I felt we 
were leaving everything we knew behind us. 
I got the idea, in the first day on the river, 
that we were quite lost, and were only pushing 
the old Cygnet along to keep up our spirits. 
We crawled close under the walls of the forest. 
Our vessel looked about as large and im- 
portant as a leaf adrift. That place is so 
immense that I saw we were going to make 
no impression on it. It wouldn't matter to 
anybody but ourselves if it swallowed us up. 
On the first day I saw a round head and 
two yellow eyes in it, watching us go by. 
The thought went through my mind: ^a 
jaguar.' The watching face vanished on the 
instant, and I always felt afterwards that the 
forest knew all about us, but wouldn't let us 
know anything. I got the idea that it wasn't 
of the least use going on, unless we didn't in- 
tend to treat the job seriously. If we were 
serious about it then it was evident we ought 
to turn back." 

^'Didn't the skipper ever say what he thought 
of it?" 

^'What could Purdy think, or do? There 

[140] 



The Ship-Runners 

was that river, and the forest on both sides of 
it, and the sun over us. Nothing else but the 
quiet; and we didn't know where our destina- 
tion was. We anchored every evening, close 
to the bank. One evening, as we anchored, a 
shower of arrows clattered about us. There 
was just one shower, out of the trees, or out of 
the clouds." 

'What was Jessie doing all this time?" I 
ventured to ask him. 

''Why, what was any one doing? She 
wasn't an anxiety of my department. I sup- 
pose she was there for the only reason I had — 
because she asked for it. It was the same 
next day, except that instead of more arrows 
we found a python in the bunkers. Came 
aboard over the hawsers, I suppose. We were 
a lively lunatic asylum below while killing 
it with fire-shovels and crowbars. That was 
what the voyage was like. The whole lot 
of it was the same, and you knew quite well 
that the farther you went the less anything 
mattered. There were slight variations each 
day of snakes, mosquitoes, and fevers, to keep 
you from feeling dead already." 

"I've often wondered," I confessed, think- 
ing to bring Hanson to something I wanted 
to hear, "what happened to your company. 

[141] 



London River 

Once we had a word of Purdy, but never of 
Jessie or of you." 

''Well, now I'm telling you. But you'd 
have been past wondering if you'd been with 
us. Purdy wasn't companionable. He'd tell 
me it was hot. And it was. You could feel 
that yourself. Jessie cooked our meals. Her 
galley could have been only a shade better 
than the engine-room. She began to look 
rather faded. At last I was the only one who 
hadn't been down with fever. We crawled on 
and on, and the only question was where we 
ourselves would end, for the forest and the 
river were never going to. But you didn't 
care. I'd never been better in my life, and 
here was the thing I'd always wanted to see. 
I could have gone on for ever like that, won- 
dering what we should see round the next 
corner. 

''Our big troubles were to come. Up to 
then, we hadn't run into anything really 
drastic after turning a corner. I suppose we 
had had about a month of it, and God knows 
where we were, but we had nobody to ask; 
and then we ran on a sandbar. The jungle 
met overhead. We were in what was only a 
dark drain through the forest. So this, I 
thought, is where we throw in our hand. We 

[142] 



The Ship-Runners 

might as well have been in another planet for 
all the chance we had of getting away from 
that place. We were aground for two days; 
the river then rose a foot, and we came off. 
The men were complaining among themselves 
by then. I heard them talking to each other 
about chucking it. It was bound to come. 
This day they went aft in a body to Purdy. 
There stood Purdy, a little object in white 
against the gloom of the forest, and he looked 
about as futile as the last match in a wind 
at night. He stood fingering a beard he had 
grown. One of the men was beginning to 
talk truculently at him. Just then Jessie 
appeared from below, between me and the 
group. She had been down with fever 
for some days, and she surprised me as much 
as a ghost. She looked rather like one, too. 
She stood watching Purdy, without moving. 
He didn't look at her, though he must have 
known she was there. I'm pretty sure we 
had to thank her for what happened to us 
afterwards, for it was then that Purdy began 
shaking his finger at that big stoker who was 
shouting. I'd never seen him with such an 
expression before. As near as he could be 
wild, he was. 'We're going on,' said Purdy 
to them very distinctly. 'This ship continues 

[143] 



London River 

her voyage. If you want to leave her here, 
I'll put you ashore.' He walked away some 
paces, and came back to the men. Then he 
said something more in his usual voice. 'Do 
you men tell me you're afraid of the job? 
I don't believe it. It can be done. We'll do 
it. We'll do it. Mr. Hanson,' he called out, 
'we are ready to get under way. Would you 
please stand by?' 

"The men never said another word. They 
went for'ard. It was very curious, but after 
that they behaved as though they had another 
skipper. Yet they were properly frightened 
by what they thought was ahead of them. My 
lot below were always asking me about it, 
and I handed them the usual ornamental and 
soothing lies, in which they believed long 
enough to keep the steam up. What more 
could you ask of human nature? So we kept 
her plugging along, getting nearer and nearer 
nowhere. We turned another of those dra- 
matic corners, later on, though I forget how 
much later, and ahead of us the river was piled 
high with rocks, and was tumbling from above. 
The Cygnet had had her fair share of luck, 
but luck could not get her over that. We were 
all looking at the white water ahead, and 
feeling — at least I was — that we were being 

[144] 



The Ship-Runners 

laughed at, When I heard Purdy call me, and 
turned round. He was hurrying towards me 
round the gear, and I thought from the look 
of him that this complete frustration had 
turned his mind. He signed for me to follow 
him, and I did it, wondering what we should 
do with a lunatic added to all the rest of it. 
I followed him into 'his cabin. What can I 
do?' he said, and bent over his berth, 'what 
can I do?' 

'^Jessie was curled up on her side in his 
berth, and there was nothing anyone could do. 
I didn't know she was alive. But she half 
opened her eyes, without looking up, and her 
hand began moving towards Purdy. 'That 
you. Bill?' she said. Purdy flopped down 
beside her. I got out. 

''So I took over for a bit — the mate was no 
good — and waited for the next thing. That 
affair disheartened the men a lot, and I took 
it for granted, from their faces as they stood 
round that figure in a tarpaulin under a tree 
in the forest, that we were witnessing the end. 
There was Purdy, too . . . you couldn't ex- 
pect much from him after a funeral." 

Hanson bent over the table, and began tap- 
ping it with a finger, and spoke slowly through 
a surprise he still felt. "Old Purdy came to 

[145] 



London River 

me the following morning, and told me what 
he intended to do. What do you think? He 
reckoned that, though we were still a hundred 
miles from the headquarters of the consignees, 
an outpost was probably no farther than just 
above the falls. He himself was going to 
prospect, for there should be a native trail 
through the woods, past the rapids; and he 
left me in charge. 

'^Macandrew was all wrong about that fel- 
low. In two days he was back. He had 
found an outpost, four miles above, but no- 
body was there, so we could get no help. He 
was going to land our cargo of a ton and a 
half of machinery, and place it on the com- 
pany's territory above the falls. 'You can 
see for yourself,' Purdy said to me pathetic- 
ally, 'that I can't deliver the Cygnet there. 
But I think I am right in making her secure 
and leaving her here, and reporting it. What 
else can I do? They ought to give me a clean 
receipt.' 

''It was funny enough, that anxiety about a 
ship and machinery where there was nothing 
but monkeys and parrots, but I agreed with 
him, and we got to work landing those pack- 
ages of mining gear, which only an expert 
could understand, in a place where nothing 

[146] 



The Ship-Runners 

was likely to happen till the Last Day. The 
way we sweated over it! And then warped 
the stuff with snatch blocks through four 
miles of jungle. Yes; and buried two men of 
our company on the way. But we did get the 
cargo on to the company's damned land at 
last, and a nice lot of half-naked scarecrows 
we looked, with nothing to fill our hollow 
cheeks but whiskers. There the name of the 
place was all right, 'Tres Irmaos,' painted 
over a shed. The shed was falling to pieces. 
There was nobody about. Nothing but a 
little open space, and the forest around, and 
the sun blazing down at us. 

^'We pushed on for headquarters, Purdy 
leading us. A hundred miles to go! I don't 
know how we did it. Three more died, in- 
cluding the mate, but we didn't bury those. 
Purdy kept on the move. He told me, after 
an eternity, that it was just ahead of us, and at 
last we did come to some other men. They 
were Colombians. We astonished them, but 
nothing could astonish us any more. Purdy 
learned that he had got to our ultimate desti- 
nation all right. Then some fellow appeared, 
in a gaudy uniform and a sword, who spoke 
English. When Purdy asked to be taken to 
the manager of the company, this gay chap 

[147] 



London River 

laughed fiercely, and kept looking at Purdy 
in triumph. 'Him?' he shouted, when he 
had got enough fun out of it, 'him? He's 
dead. We execute him. All those people — 
they go. No more company. All finish. 
No good.' He was very bright about it. 

'Turdy never said a word. All he did was 
to turn to me, and then stare beyond me with 
big eyes at something which couldn't possibly 
have been there." 



[148] 



VII. Not in the Almanac 



VII. Not in the Almanac 

IT was an unlucky Friday morning; ''and, 
what's more," the chief officer stopped on 
the gangway to call down to me on the 
quay, ''a black cat crossed my path when I left 
home this morning, and a very nice black cat 
it was." The gangway was hauled up. The 
tugs began to move the big steamer away from 
us, a process so slow that the daylight between 
us and the ship increased imperceptibly. 

On my way home I paused by the shop 
which sells such antiques as old spring mat- 
tresses, china dogs, portable baths, dumb-bells, 
and even the kind of bedroom furniture 
which one would never have supposed was 
purchasable at second-hand. But lower, 
much lower in the shopkeeper's estimate than 
even such commodities — thrown into a bin be- 
cause they were rubbish, and yet not quite 
valueless — was a mass of odd volumes. 
The First Principles of Algebra, Acts 
Relating to Pawnbrokers, and Jessica^s First 

[151] 



London River 

Prayer, were discovered in that order. The 
next was Superstitions of the Sea. 

I am not superstitious. I have never met a 
man who was. And look at the ships in dock 
today, without figure-heads, with masts that 
are only the support of derricks and the aeri- 
als of wireless, and with science and an offi- 
cial certificate of competency even in the gal- 
ley! Could anything happen in such ships to 
bring one to awe and wonder? The dark of 
the human mind is now lighted, one may say, 
with electricity. We have no shadows to 
make us hesitate. That book of sea supersti- 
tions was on my table, some weeks later, and a 
sailor, who gave up trading to the East to pa- 
trol mine-fields for three years, and who has 
never been known to lose any time when in 
doubt through wasting it on a secret propitia- 
tory gesture, picked up the book, smiling a lit- 
tle superciliously, lost his smile when ex- 
amining it, and then asked if he might bor- 
row it. 

We are not superstitious, now we are sure a 
matter may be mysterious only when we have 
not had the leisure to test it in the right way, 
but we have our private reservations. There 
is a ship's doctor, who has been called a hard 
case by those who know him, for he has grown 

[152] 



Not in the Almanac 

grey and serious in watching humanity from 
the Guinea Coast to the South Seas. He only 
smiles now when listening to a religious or a 
political discussion, and might not be supposed 
to have any more regard for the mysteries than 
you would find in the Cold Storage Gazette. 
When he is home again we go to the British 
Museum. He always takes me there. It is 
one of his weaknesses. I invited him, when 
last we were there, to let us search out a 
certain exhibit from Egypt about which curi- 
ous stories are whispered. ''No you don't," 
he exclaimed peremptorily. He gave me no 
argument, but I gathered that it is very well 
to be funny about such coincidences, yet that 
one never certainly knows, and that it is better 
to regard the unexplored dark with a well- 
simulated respect till one can see through it. 
He had, he said, known of affairs in the East, 
and they were not provided for in the books ; 
he had tried to see through them from all 
points, but not with the satisfaction he desired. 
For that reason he never invited trouble unless 
he knew it was not there. 

Another man, very like him, a master 
mariner, and one who knew me well enough 
for secrets, was bringing me from the French 
coast for Barry at full speed, in a fog. He was 

[153] 



London River 

a clever, but an indiscreet navigator. I was 
mildly rebuking him by the door of his 
chart-room for his foolhardiness, but he 
laughed quietly, said he intended to make a 
good passage, which his owners expected, and 
that when the problem was straightforward 
he used science, but that when it was all a fog 
he trusted mainly to his instinct, or whatever 
it might be, to inform him in time. I was 
not to be alarmed. We should have the Liz- 
ard eight miles on the starboard beam in 
another hour and a half. By this time we 
were continuing our talk in the chart-room. 
An old cap of his was on the floor, upside 
down. I faced him there, in rebuke of this 
reliance on instinct, but he was staring at 
the cap, a little startled. Then he dashed 
past me without a word for the bridge. While 
following him at leisure I heard the telegraph 
ring. Outside I could see nothing but the pal- 
lor of a blind world. The flat sea was but 
the fugitive lustre of what might have been 
water; but all melted into nothing at a distance 
which could have been anywhere. The 
tremor of the ship lessened, and the noise of 
the wash fell, for the speed had slackened. 
We might have become hushed, and were 
waiting, listening and anxious, for something 

[154] 



Not in the Almanac 

that was invisible, but threatening. Then I 
heard the skipper's voice, quick but quiet, 
and arrived on the bridge in time to see the 
man at the v^heel putting it hard over. 
Something had been sighted ahead of us, and 
now^ was growing broad on the starboard bow 
' — a faint presentment of land, high and un- 
related, for there was a luminous void below 
it. It was a filmy and coloured ghost in the 
sky, with a thin shine upon it of a sun we 
could not see. It grew more material as we 
watched it, and brighter, a near and indubit- 
able coast. ^'I know where I am now," said 
the skipper. '^Another minute or two, and 
we should have been on the Manacles." 

Smiling a little awkwardly, he explained 
that he had seen that old cap on the floor 
before, without knowing how it could have 
got there, and at the same time he had felt 
very nervous, without knowing why. The 
last time was when, homeward bound in 
charge of a fine steamer, he hoped Finisterre 
was' distant, but not too far off. Just about 
there, as it were; and that his dead reckoning 
was correct. The weather had been dirty, 
the seas heavy, and the sun invisible. He 
went on, to find nothing but worse weather. 
He did sight, however, two other steamers, 

[155] 



London River 

on the same course as himself, evidently 
having calculated to pass Ushant in the morn- 
ing; his own calculation. He would be off 
Ushant later, for his speed was less than theirs. 
There they were, a lucky and unexpected 
confirmation of his own reasoning. His chief 
officer, an elderly man full of doubt, smiled 
again, and smacked his hands together. That 
was all right. My friend then went into the 
chart-room, and underwent the strange ex- 
perience we know. He wondered a little, 
concluded it was just as well to be on the safe 
side, and slightly altered his course. Early 
next morning he sighted Ushant. There was 
nothing to spare. He was, indeed, cutting it 
fine. The seas were great, and piled up on 
the rocks of that bad coast were the two steam- 
ers he had sighted the day before. 

Why had not the other two masters received 
the same nudge from Providence before it 
was too late? That is what the unfortunate, 
who cannot genuinely offer solemn thanks 
like the lucky, will never know, though they 
continually ask. It is the darkest and most 
unedifying part of the mystery. Moreover, 
that side of the question, as a war has helped 
us to remember, never troubles the lucky ones. 
Yet I wish to add that later, my friend, when 

[156] 



Not in the Almanac 

in waters not well known, in charge of a 
ship on her maiden voyage — for he always got 
the last and best ship from his owners, they 
having recognized that his stars were well- 
assorted — was warned that to attempt a cer- 
tain passage, in some peculiar circumstances, 
was what a wise man would not lightly under- 
take. But my friend was young, daring, 
clever, and fortunate. That morning his cap 
was not on the floor. At night his valuable 
ship with her exceptionally valuable cargo 
was fast for ever on a coral reef. 

What did that prove? Apart from the fact 
that if the young reject the experience of 
their elders they may regret it, just as they 
may regret if they do pay heed to it, his later 
misfortune proves nothing; except, perhaps, 
that the last thing on which a man should 
rely, unless he must, is the supposed favour 
of the gods of whom he knows nothing but, 
say, a cap unreasonably on the floor; yet gods, 
nevertheless, whose existence even the wise 
and dubious cannot flatly deny. 

It may have been for a reason of such a 
sort that I did not lend my book to my young 
sailor friend who wished to borrow it. I 
should never have had it back. Men go to 
sea, and forget us. Our world has narrowed 

[157] 



London River 

and has shut out Vanderdecken for ever. But 
now that everything private and personal 
about us which is below the notice even of the 
Freudian professor is pigeon-holed by officials 
at the Town Hall, I enjoy reading the abun- 
dant evidence for the Extra Hand, that one 
of the ship's company who cannot be counted 
in the watch, but is felt to be there. And 
now that every Pacific dot is a concession to 
some registered syndicate of money-makers, 
the Isle-of-No-Land-At-AU, which some 
lucky mariners profess to have sighted, is our 
last chance of refuge. We cannot let even 
the thought of it go. 



[is8] 



VIII. The Illusion 



VIII. The Illusion 

WHEN I came to the house in Mal- 
abar Street to which John Williams, 
master mariner, had retired from 
the sea, his wife was at her front gate. It 
was evening, and from the distant River a 
steamer called. Mrs. Williams did not see 
me, for her grey head was turned away. She 
was watching, a little down the street, an 
officer of the Merchant Service, with his cap 
set like a challenge, for he was very young, 
and a demure girl with a market-basket who 
was with him. They were standing in amused 
perplexity before their house door. It was 
a house that had been empty since the foun- 
dering of the Drummond Castle. The sailor 
was searching his pockets for the door-key, 
and the girl was laughing at his pretended 
lively nervousness in not finding it. Mrs. 
Williams had not heard me stop at her elbow, 
and continued to watch the comedy. She had 
no children, and she loved young people. 
I did not speak, but waited for her to turn, 

[i6i] 



London River 

with that ship's call still sounding in my mind. 
The rain had cleared for a winter sunset. 
Opposite, in the house which had been turned 
into a frugal shop, it was thought so near to 
night that they lit their lamp, though it was 
not only possible to see the bottles of sweet- 
stuff and the bundles of wood in the window, 
but to make out the large print of a bill stuck 
to a pane announcing a concert at the Wesleyan 
Mission Room. The lamp was alight also in 
the little beer-house next door to it, where the 
Shipping Gazette could be borrowed, if it 
were not already out on loan; for children 
constantly go there for it, with a request from 
mother, learning their geography that way in 
Malabar Street, while following a father or a 
brother round the world and back again, and 
working out by dead-reckoning whether he 
would be home for Christmas. 

The quiet street, with every house alike, had 
that air of conscious reserve which is given by 
the respectable and monotonous; but for a 
moment then it was bright with the glory of 
the sky's afterglow reflected on its wet pave- 
ments, as though briefly exalted with an un- 
expected revelation. The radiance died. 
Night came, and it was as if the twilight 
native to the street clouded from its walls and 

[162] 



The Illusion 

brimmed it with gloom, while yet the sky 
was bright. The lamplighter set his beacon 
at the end of the street. 

That key had been found. Mrs. Williams 
laughed to herself, and then saw me. ^'Oh," 
she exclaimed. ^'I didn't know you were 
there. Did you see that? That lamplighter! 
When Williams was at sea, and I was alone, 
it was quite hopeful when the lamplighter did 
that. It looked like a star. And that Num- 
ber Ten is let at last. Did you see the young 
people there? I'm sure they're newly married. 
He's a sailor." 

With the fire, the humming kettle, and the 
cat between us, and the table laid for tea, Mrs. 
Williams speculated with interest and hope 
about those young strangers. Did I notice 
what badge was on his cap? My eyes were 
better than hers. She trusted it would be all 
right for them. They were starting very 
young. It was better to start young. She 
looked such a good little soul, that girl. It 
was pleasant to know that house was let at 
last. It had been empty too long. It was 
getting a name. People could not help re- 
membering why it was empty. But young 
life would make it bright. 

^Teople say things only change, but I like 

[163] 



London River 

to think they change for the better, don't you? 
But Williams, he will have it they change for 
the worse. I don't know, I'm sure. He 
thinks nothing really good except the old 
days." She laughed quietly, bending to tickle 
the cat's ear — ^'nothing good at all except the 
old days. Even the wrecks were more like 
wrecks." She looked at me, smiling. 

''As you know," she said, ''there's many 
men who follow the sea with homes in this 
street, but Williams is so proud and strong- 
willed. He says he doesn't want to hear 
about them. What do they know about the 
sea? You know his way. What do they 
know about the sea! That's the way he 
talks, doesn't he? But surely the sea is the 
same for us all. He won't have it, though. 
Williams is so vain and determined." 

The captain knocked. There was no doubt 
about that knock. The door surrendered to 
him. His is a peremptory summons. The 
old master mariner brought his bulk with 
dignity into the room, and his wife, reaching 
up to that superior height, too slight for the 
task, ministered to the overcoat of the big 
figure which was making, all unconsciously, 
disdainful noises in its throat. It would have 
been worse than useless for me to interfere. 

[164] 



The Illusion 

The pair would have repelled me. This was 
a domestic rite. Once in his struggle with his 
coat the dominant figure glanced down at the 
earnestness of his little mate, paused for a 
moment, and the stern face relaxed. 

With his attention concentrated and severe 
even in so small an effort as taking from his 
broad back a reluctant coat, and the unvarying 
fixed intentness of the dark eyes over which 
the lids, loose with age, had partly folded, 
giving him the piercing look of a bird of prey; 
and the swarthiness of his face, massive, hair- 
less, and acutely ridged, with its crown of 
tousled white hair, his was a figure which 
made it easy to believe the tales one had heard 
of him when he was the master of the Oberon, 
and drove his ship home with the new season's 
tea, leaving, it is said, a trail of light spars all 
the way from Tientsin to the Channel. 

The coat was off. His wife had it over her 
arm, and was regarding with concern the big 
petulant face above her. She said to him: 
"Number Ten is let at last. They're a young 
couple who have got it. He's a sailor." 

The old man sat down at a corner of the 
table, stooped, and in one handful abruptly 
hauled the cat off the rug, laying its unresisting 
body across his knees, and rubbing its ribs 

[165] 



London River 

with a hand that half covered it. He did not 
appear to have heard what he had been told. 
He did not look at her, but talked gravely to 
the fire. ''I met Dennison today," he said, 
as if speaking aloud to himself, in surprise at 
meeting Dennison. ''Years since I saw him," 
he continued, turning to me. 'Where was it 
now, where was it? Must have been Canton 
River, the year he lost his ship. Extraordin- 
ary to find Dennison still afloat. Not many of 
those men about now. You can go the length 
of the Dock Road today and see nothing and 
meet nobody." 

He looked again into the flames, fixedly, as 
though what he really wanted was only to be 
found in them. His wife was at his elbow. 
She, too, was watching them, still with his 
coat over her arm. She spoke aloud, though 
more to herself than to us. "She seemed such 
a nice little woman, too. I couldn't see the 
badge on his cap." 

"Eh?" said the old man, throwing the cat 
back to the floor and rounding to his wife. 
"What's that? Let's have tea, Mrs. Williams. 
We're both dreaming, and there's a visitor. 
What are you dreaming about? You've noth- 
ing to dream about." 

[1 66] 



The Illusion 

There was never any doubt, though, that 
the past was full and alive to him. There was 
only the past. And what a memory was his! 
He would look at the portrait of his old clip- 
per, the Oberon — it was central over the man- 
tel-shelf — and recall her voyages, and the days 
in each voyage, and just how the weather 
was, what canvas she carried, and how things 
happened. Malabar Street vanished. We 
would go, when he was in that mood, and live 
for the evening in another year, with men who 
have gone, among strange affairs forgotten. 

Mrs. Williams would be in her dream, too, 
with her work-basket in her lap, absently 
picking the table-cloth with her needle. But 
for us, all we knew was that the Cinderella 
had a day's start of us, and the weather in the 
Southern Ocean, when we got there, was like 
the death of the world. I was aware that we 
were under foresail, lower topsails, and stay- 
sails only, and they were too much. They 
were driving us under, and the Oberon was 
tender. Yes, she was very tricky. But where 
was the Cinderella? Anyhow, she had a day's 
start of us. Captain Williams vs^ould rise 
then, and stand before his ship's picture, 
pointing into her rigging. 

[167] 



London River 

^'I must go in and see that girl," said the 
captain's wife once, when we were in the 
middle of one of our voyages. 

'^Eh?" questioned her husband, instantly 
bending to her, but keeping his forefinger 
pointing to his old ship; thinking, perhaps, 
his wife was adding something to his narra- 
tive he had forgotten. 

''Yes," she said, and did not meet his face. 
''I must go in and see her. He's been gone a 
week now. He must be crossing the Bay, 
and look at the weather we've had. I know 
what it is." 

I did then leave our voyage in the past for 
a moment, to listen to the immediate weather 
without. It was certainly a wild night. I 
should get wet when I left for home. 

''Ah!" exclaimed the puzzled captain, 
suddenly enlightened, with his finger still 
addressing the picture on the wall. "She 
means the man down the street. An engineer, 
isn't he? The missis calls him a sailor." He 
continued that voyage, made in 1862. 

There was one evening when, on the home 
run, we had overhauled and passed our rivals 
in the race, and were off the Start. Captain 
Williams was serving a tot all round, in a 
propitiatory act, hoping to lower the masts of 

[168] 



The Illusion 

the next astern deeper beneath the horizon, 
and to keep them there till he was off Black- 
wall Point. He then found he wanted to 
show me a letter, testimony to the work of his 
ship, which he had received that voyage from 
his owners. Where was it? The missis knew, 
and he looked over his shoulder for her. But 
she was not there. 

They must have been the days to live in, 
when China was like that, and there was all 
the East, and such ships, and men who were 
seamen and navigators in a way that is lost. 
As the old master mariner, who had lived in 
that time, would sometimes demand of me : 
What is the sea now? Steamers do not make 
time, or lose it. They keep it. They run to 
schedule, one behind the other, in processions. 
They have nothing to overcome. They do not 
fail, and they cannot triumph. They are pre- 
destined engines, and the sea is but their track. 
Yet it had been otherwise. And the old man 
would brood into the greater past, his voice 
would grow quiet, and he would gently em- 
phasize his argument by letting one hand, 
from a fixed wrist, rise, and fall sadly on 
the table, in a gesture of solemn finality. He 
was in that act, early one evening, while his 
wife was reading a newspaper; and I had 

[169] 



London River 

risen to go, and stood for a moment silent in 
the thought that these of ours were lesser 
days, and their petty demands and trivial 
duties made of men but mere attendants on 
uninspiring process. 

Serene Mrs. Williams, reading her paper, 
and not in our world at all, at that moment 
struck the paper into her lap, and fixed me 
with surprise and shock in her eyes, as though 
she had just repelled that mean print in a 
malicious attempt at injury. Her husband 
took no notice. She handed me the paper, 
with a finger on a paragraph. ^^The steamer 
Arab, which sailed on December 26 last for 
Buenos Aires, has not been heard of since that 
date, and today was ^posted' as missing." 

I remembered then a young man in uniform, 
with a rakish cap, trying to find a key while a 
girl was laughing at him. As I left the house 
I could see in the dusk, a little down the street, 
the girl standing at her gate. The street was 
empty and silent. At the end of it the lamp- 
lighter set his beacon. 



[170] 



IX. In a Coffee-Shop 



IX. In a Coffee-Shop 

WITH a day of rain, Dockland is set 
in its appropriate element. It does 
not then look better than before, but 
it looks what it is. Not sudden April showers 
are meant, sparkling and revivifying, but a 
drizzle, thin and eternal, as if the rain were 
no more than the shadow cast by a sky as 
unchanging as poverty. When real night 
comes, then the street lamps dissolve ochreous 
hollows in the murk. It was such a day as 
that; it was not night, for the street lamps 
were not alight. There was no sound. The 
rain was as noiseless as the passage of time. 
Two other wayfarers were in the street with 
me. One had no right there, nor anywhere, 
and knew it, slinking along with his head 
and tail held low, trailing a length of string 
through the puddles. The other, too, seemed 
lost He was idling as if one street was the 
same as another, and on that day there was 
rain in all. He came towards me, with his 
hands in his pockets and his coat collar up. 
He turned on me briskly, with a sudden de- 

[173] 



London River 

cision, when he drew level. Water dripped 
from the peak of his cap, and his clothes 
were heavy and dark with it. He spoke. 
^'Mister, could ye give me a hand up? I've 
made a mess of it." His cheerful and rather 
insolent assurance faltered for a moment. He 
then mumbled: ^Tve been on the booze 
y'understand." But there was still something 
in his tone which suggested that any good 
man might have done the same thing. 

It is not easy to be even sententious with the 
sinful when an open confession robs us of our 
moral prerogative, so I only told him that 
it seemed likely booze had something to do 
with it. His age could have been forty; but 
it was not easy to judge, for the bridge of his 
nose was a livid depression. Some accident 
had pushed in his face under the eyes, giving 
him the battered aspect of ancient sin. His 
sinister appearance would have frightened any 
timid lady if he had stopped her in such a 
street, on such a day, with nobody about but 
a lost dog, and the houses, it could be sup- 
posed, deserted, or their inmates secluded in 
an abandonment to misery. And, taking 
another glance at him, I thought it probable, 
from the frank regard of the blue and frivolous 
eye which met mine, that he would have rec- 

[174] 



In a Coffee-Shop 

ognized timidity in a lady at a distance, and 
would have passed her without seeing her. 
Uncertain whether his guess in stopping me 
was lucky, he began pulling nervously at a 
bleached moustache. His paw was the colour 
of leather. Its nails were broken and stained 
with tar. 

"Can't you get work?" I suggested. "Why 
don't you go to sea?" 

This deliberately unfair question shook his 
upright confidence in himself, and perhaps 
convinced him that he had, after all, stopped 
a fool. He took his cap off, and flung a 
shower from it — it had been draining into his 
moustache — and asked whether I did not 
think he looked poor enough for a sailor. 

Then I heard how he came to be there. 
Two days before he had signed the articles of 
the steamship Bilbao. His box had gone 
aboard, and that contained all his estate. The 
skipper, to be sure of his man, had taken care 
of his discharge book, and so was in posses- 
sion of the only proof of his identity. Then 
he left the shipping office, and met some 
friends. 

Those friends! "That was a fine girl," he 
said, speaking more to the rain than to me. 
"I never seen a finer." I began to show signs 

[175] 



London River 

of moving away. ^'Don't go, mister. She 
was all right. I lay you never seen a finer. 
Look here. I reckon you know her." He 
plunged an eager hand into an inner pocket. 
"Ever heard of Angel Light? She's on the 
stage. It's a fact. She showed me her name 
herself on a programme last night. There 
y'are." He triumphed with a photograph, 
and his gnarled forefinger pointed at an ex- 
posed set of teeth under an extraordinary hat. 
"Eh, ain't that all right? On the stage, too. 
Met her at the corner of Pennyfields." 

It was still raining. He flung another 
shower from his cap. I was impatient, but he 
took my lapel confidentially. "Guv'nor," he 
said, "if I could find the swab as took my 
money, I lay I'd make him look so as his own 
mother 'ud turn her back on him. I would. 
Ten quid." 

He had, it appeared, lost those friends. He 
was now seeking, with varying emotions, both 
the girl and the swab. I suggested the dock 
and his ship would be a better quest. No, it 
was no good, he said. He tried that late last 
night. Both had gone. The policeman at 
the gate told him so. The dock was there 
again this morning, but a different policeman; 
and whatever improbable world the dock and 

[176] 



In a Coffee-Shop 

the policeman of midnight had visited, there 
they had left his ship, inaccessible, tangled 
hopelessly in a revolving mesh of saloon lights 
and collapsing streets. Now he had no name, 
no history, no character, no money, and he 
was hungry. 

We went into a cofifee-shop. It stands at 
the corner of the street which is opposite the 
Steam Packet beerhouse. You may recognize 
the place, for it is marked conspicuously as 
a good pull-up for carmen, though then the 
carmen were taking their vans steadily past it. 
The buildings of a shipwright's yard stand 
above it, and the hammers of the yard beat 
with a continuous rhythmic clangour which 
recedes, when you are used to it, till it is only 
the normal pulse of life in your ears. The 
time was three in the afternoon. The children 
were at school, and alone the men of the 
iron-yard made audible the unseen life of the 
place. We had the cofTee-shop to ourselves. 
On the counter a jam roll was derelict. Some 
crumpled and greasy newspapers sprawled on 
the benches. The outcast squeezed into a 
corner of a bench, and a stout and elderly 
matron appeared, drying her bare arms on her 
apron, and looked at us with annoyance. My 
friend seized her hand, patted it, and addressed 



London River 

her in terms of extravagant endearment. She 
spoke to him about that. But food came; 
and as he ate — how he ate! — I waited, looking 
into my own mug of tepid brown slop at 
twopence the pint. There was a racing cal- 
endar punctuated with dead flies, and a picture 
in the dark by the side of the door of Lord 
Beaconsfield, with its motto: ''For God, 
King, and Country"; and there was a smell 
which comes of long years of herrings cooked 
on a gas grill. At last the hungry child had 
finished scraping his plate and wiping his 
moustache with his hands. He brought out 
a briar pipe, and a pouch of hairy skin, and 
faded behind a blue cloud. From behind the 
cloud he spoke at large, like a confident dis- 
reputable Jove who had been skylarking for 
years with the little planet Earth. 

At a point in his familiar reminiscences my 
dwindling interest vanished, and I noticed 
again, through the window, the house fronts 
of the place I knew once, when Poplar was 
salt. The lost sailor himself was insignificant. 
What was he? A deck hand ; one who tarred 
iron, and could take a trick at the wheel when 
some one was watching him. The place out- 
side might have been any dismal neighbour- 
hood of London. Its character had gone. 

[178] 



In a Coffee-Shop 

The tap-tapping on iron plates in the yard 
next door showed where we were today. The 
sailor was silent for a time, and we listened 
together to the sound of rivets going home. 
'That's right," said the outcast. ''Make 
them bite. Good luck to the rivets. What 
yard is that?" I told him. 

"What? I didn't know it was about 
here. That place! Well, it's a good 
yard, that. They're all right. I was on a 
steamer that went in there, one trip. She 
wanted it, too. You could put a chisel 
through her. But they only put in what they 
were paid for, not what she wanted. The 
old Starlight. She wouldn't have gone in 
then but for a bump she got. Do you know 
old Jackson? Lives in Foochow Street round 
about here somewhere. He's lived next to 
that pub in Foochow Street for years and 
years. He was the old man of the Starlight. 
He's a sailor all right, is Jackson. 

"The last trip I had with him was ten 
months ago. The Starlight came in here to 
the West Dock with timber. She had to go 
into dry-dock, and I signed on for her again 
when she was ready. This used to be my 
home. Poplar, before I married that Cardiff 
woman. Do you know Poplar at all? Pop- 

[179] 



London River 

lar's all right. We went over to Rotterdam 
for something or other, but sailed from there 
light, for Fowey. We loaded about three 
thousand tons of china clay for Baltimore. 

''The sea got up when we were abreast of 
the Wolf that night, and she was a wet ship. 
'We're running into it,' said old Jackson to the 
mate. I was at the wheel. 'Look out, and 
call me if I'm wanted.' " 

The man pushed his plate away, and leaned 
towards me, elbows on the table, putting close 
his flat and brutish face, with his wet hair 
plastered over all the brow he had. He ap- 
peared to be a little drowsy with food. "Ever 
crossed the Western ocean in winter? Some- 
times there's nothing in it. But when it's bad 
there's no word for it. There was our old 
bitch, filling up for'ard every time she 
dropped, and rolling enough to shift the 
boilers. We reckoned something was coming 
all right. Then when it began to blow, from 
dead ahead, the old man wouldn't ease her. 
That was like old Jackson. It makes you 
think of your comfortable little home, watch- 
ing them big grey-backs running by your ship, 
and no hot grub because the galley's flooded. 
The Wolf was only two days behind us, and 
we had all the way to go. It was lively, 

[1 80] 



In a Coffee-Shop 

guv'nor. The third night I was in with the 
cook helping him to get something for the 
men. They'd been roping her hatches. 
The covers were beginning to come adrift, 
y'understand. The cook, he was slipping 
about, grousing all round. Then she stopped 
dead, and the lights went out. Something 
swept right over us with a hell of a rush, and 
I felt the deck give under my feet. The galley 
filled with water. ^Christ, she's done,' shouted 
the cook. 

"We scrambled out. It was too dark to see 
anything, but we could hear the old man 
shouting. The engines had stopped. I fell 
over some wreckage." The sailor stroked his 
nose. "This' is what it did. 

''Next morning you wouldn't have known 
the old Starlight, All her boats had gone, 
and she had a list to port like a roof. You 
wanted to be a bird to get about her. The 
crowd looked blue enough when they saw the 
falls flying around at daylight, and only bits of 
boats. It was a case. Every time she lay 
down in the trough, and a sea went over her 
solid, we watched her come up again. She 
took her time about it. 

"The engineers were at it below, trying to 
get her clear. They had the donkey going. 

[i8i] 



London River 

In the afternoon we sighted a steamer's smoke 
to westward. She bore down on us. I never 
seen anything I liked better than that. Then 
the Chief came up, and I saw him talking to 
the old man. The old man climbed round to 
us. 'Now, lads,' he said, 'there's a Cunarder 
coming. But the engineer says he reckons 
he's getting her clear of water. What about 
it? Shall I signal the liner, or will you stand 
by her?' 

''We let the Cunarder go. I watched her 
out of sight. We hung around, and just about 
sunset the Chief came up again. I heard 
what he said. 'It's overhauling us fast, sir,' 
he said to the old man. The old man, he 
stood looking down at the deck. Nobody said 
anything for a spell. Then a fireman shot 
through a companion on all fours, scrambled 
to the bulwarks, and looked out. He began 
cursing the sun, shaking his fist at it every 
time it popped over the seas. It was low 
down. It was funny to hear him. 'So long, 
chaps,' he said, and dropped overside. 

"We waited all night. I couldn't sleep, 
what with the noise of the seas running over 
us, and waiting for something to happen. It 
was perishing cold, too. At sun-up I could 
see she might pitch under at any time. She 

[1-82] 



In a Coffee-Shop 

was about awash. The old man came to me 
and the steward, and said: ^Give the men all 
the gin they'll drink. Fill 'em up.' Some of 
'em took it. I never knew a ship take such a 
hell of a time to sink as that one. 

"I sighted the steamer, right ahead, and we 
wondered whether the iron under us would 
wait till she come. We counted every roller 
that went over us. The other steamer was a 
slow ship all right. But she came up, and put 
out her boats. We had to lower the drunks 
into them. I left in the last boat with the old 
man. ^Jim,' he said, looking at her as we left 
her, 'she's got no more than five minutes now. 
I just felt her drop. Something's given way.' 
Before we got to the other ship we saw the 
Starlight's propeller in the air. Right on end. 
Yes. I never seen anything like that — and 
then she just went . . ." 

The sailor made a grimace at me and nod- 
ded. From the shipwright's next door the 
steady, continuous hammering in the dry-dock 
was heard again, as though it had been wait- 
ing, and were now continuing the yarn. 



[183] 



X. Off-shore 



X. Off-Shore 



FOR weeks our London days had been 
handmade with gas and oil. It was a 
winter of the kind when the heaven of 
the capital is a brown obscurity not much 
above the highest reached by the churches, 
and a December more years before the War 
then it would be amusing to count. There 
was enough of the sun in that morning to 
light my way down Mark Lane, across Great 
Tower Street to Billingsgate. I was on my 
way to sea for the first time, but that fortune 
was as incredible to me as the daylight. And 
as to the daylight, the only certainty in it 
was its antiquity. It was a gloom that was 
not only because the year was exhausted, but 
because darkness was falling at the end of an 
epoch. It was not many years before the War, 
to be a little more precise, though then I was 
unaware of the reason of the darkness, except 
common fog. 

[187] 



London River 

Besides, why should a Londoner, and even 
an East-Ender whose familiar walls are 
topped by mastheads, believe in the nearness 
of the ocean? We think of the shipping no 
more than we do of the paving stones or of the 
warnings of the pious. It is an event of the 
first importance to go for a first voyage, though 
mine was to be only by steam-trawler to the 
Dogger Bank; yet, as the event had come to 
me so late, I had lost faith in the omens of 
London's foreshore, among which, at the 
bottom of Mark Lane, was an Italian baking 
chestnuts over a coke fire. The fog, and the 
slops, and the smell by Billingsgate, could 
have been tokens of no more than a twopenny 
journey to Shepherd's Bush. I had believed 
in the signs so little that I had left my bag at 
a railway station, miles away. 

Three small steamers, the size of tugs, but 
with upstanding bows and a sheer suggesting 
speed and buoyancy, were lying off the fish 
market, and mine, the Windhover^ had the 
outside berth. I climbed over to her. Blub- 
ber littered her iron deck, and slime drained 
along her gutters. Black grits showered from 
her stack. The smell from her galley, and the 
heat from her engine-room casing, were chal- 
lenging to a stranger. It was no place for me. 

[1 88] 



0£f-Shore 

The men and porters tramping about their jobs 
knew that, and did not order me out of their 
way. This was Billingsgate, and there was a 
tide to be caught. They hustled me out of it. 
But the skipper had to be found, for I must 
know when I had to come aboard. A perpen- 
dicular iron ladder led to her saloon from a 
hatch, and through unintelligence and the dark 
I entered that saloon more precipitously than 
was a measure of my eagerness, picked myself 
up with a coolness which I can only hope met 
with the approval of some silent men, watch- 
ing me, who sat at a table there, and offered 
my pass to the man nearest me. 

It was the mate. He scrutinized the simple 
document at unnecessary length, and with a 
gravity that was embarrassing. He turned 
up slowly a large and weather-beaten sadness, 
with a grizzled moustache that curled tightly 
into his mouth from under a long, thin nose 
which pointed at me like a finger. His heavy 
eyes might have been melancholy or only tired, 
and they regarded me as if they sought on 
my face what they could not find on my docu- 
ment. I thought he was searching me for 
the p:*oof of my sanity. Presently he spoke: 
''Have you got to come?" he said, and in a 
gentle voice that was disconcerting from a 

[189] 



London River 

figure so masculine. While I was wondering 
what was hidden in this question, the ship's 
master entered the saloon briskly. He was 
plump and light. His face was a smooth 
round of unctuous red, without a beard, and 
was mounted upon many folds of brown 
woollen scarf, like an attractive pudding on a 
platter. He looked at me with amusement, as 
I have no doubt those lively eyes, with their 
brows of arched interest, looked at everything; 
and his thick grey hair was curved upwards in 
a confusion of interrogation marks. 

He chuckled. ^'This is not a passenger 
ship," he said. '^That will have to be your 
berth." He pointed to a part of the saloon 
settee which was about six feet forward and 
above the propeller. ^'A sou'-wester washed 
out our only spare cabin, comin' in. There 
you are." He began to climb the ladder out 
of it again, but stopped, and put his rosy face 
under the lintel of the door. '^YouVe got 
twenty minutes now. Get your luggage 
aboard." 

My bag was where it could not be reached 
in twenty minutes. Roughing it may have its 
humours, but to suffer through it, as I was 
aware I must, if I stayed, would more 
than outweigh the legitimate interest of a first 

[190] 



Ojff-Shore 

voyage, except for heroic youth with its gift of 
eternal life. Simple ignorance, as usual, 
made me heroic. I went on deck, and found 
the steward sitting on a box, with a bucket of 
sprats before him, tearing off their heads, and 
then throwing the bodies contemptuously 
into another bucket. The ends of his fingers 
and thumbs were pink and bright, and were 
separated from the remainder of his dark 
hands by margins of glittering scales. He 
compared to me, as he beheaded the fish, 
the girls of Hull and London. But what I 
knew of the girls of but one city was so meagre 
in comparison that I could only listen to his 
particulars in silent surprise. It was notable 
that a man like that, who pulled the heads and 
guts of fish like that, should have acquired a 
knowledge so peculiar, so personal, of the girls 
of two cities. While considering whether 
what at first looked like the mystery of this 
problem might not be in reality its clue, I 
became aware of another listener. Its lean 
and dismal length was disproportionate to that 
small ship. It had on but dungarees and a 
singlet, and the singlet, because of the length 
of the figure, was concave at the stomach, 
where, having nothing to rest upon, it was 
corrugated through the weight of a head made 

[191] 



London River 
brooding by a heavy black beard. Hairy 
wrists were thrust deeply into the pockets to 
hold up the trousers. The dome of its head 
was as bald and polished as yellow metal. 
The steward introduced me to the Chief 
Engineer. ^'Yon's a dirty steward," returned 
the Chief simply. 

^'Clean enough for this ship," said the 
steward. 

^^Aye," sighed the engineer, ^'aye!" 

''Have you been to the Queen's Hall lately?" 
asked the Chief of me. "I should like to hear 
some Beethoven or Mozart tonight. Aye, but 
we're awa'. It'll be yon sprats." He sighed 
his affirmative again in resignation, and 
stood regarding the steward bending over the 
pails on the deck. "What make ye," he asked, 
"of this war between the Japs and Russia? 
Come awa' doon, and have a bit talk. I can- 
na' look at that man's hands and argue reason- 
able. It'd no be fair to ye." 

We could not have that argument then, for 
I had so little time to go ashore and purchase 
what necessaries could be remembered while 
narrowly watching the clock. I was astride 
the bulwarks again when the Windhover was 
free of her moorings. There was a lack of 
deliberation and dignity in this departure 

[192] 



Ofif-Shore 

which gave it the appearance of improvisa- 
tion, of not being the real thing. I could not 
believe it mattered whether I went or not. 
My first voyage had, that is, those common 
circumstances which always make our crises 
incredible when they face us, as if they had 
met us by accident, in mistake for some one 
else. The bascules of the Tower Bridge went 
up, this time to let out me. Yet that signif- 
icant gesture, obviously made to my ship, was 
watched with an indifference which was little 
better than cynicism. What was this city, 
past which we moved? In that haze it was 
only the fading impress of what once was 
there, of what once had overlooked the de- 
parture of voyagers, when on memorable 
journeys, in famous ships. Now it had almost 
gone. It had seen its great days. There was 
nothing more to watch upon its River, and 
so it was going. And was an important voy- 
age ever made by one who had forgotten his 
overcoat? The steward rose, raised his 
bucket of fish offal, emptied it overboard, and 
went below. It was not easy to believe that 
such a voyage could come to anything, for 
London itself was intangible, and when we got 
past those heavier shades which were the city, 
and were running along the Essex marshes, 

[193] 



London River 

though there was more light, there was nothing 
to be seen, not even land substantial enough 
to be a shadow. There was only the length 
of our own ship. Our pilot left us, and we 
felt our way to the Lower Hope, a place I 
could have accepted if it had not been on 
the chart, and anchored. 

Night came, and drove me below to the 
saloon, where we made five who sat with the 
sprats, now fried, and mugs of tea before us. 
The saloon was the hollow stern, a triangle 
with a little fireplace in its base, and four 
bunks in its sides. Its centre was filled with a 
triangular table, over which, pendent from 
the skylight, was an oil-lamp in chains. A 
settee ran completely round the sides, and on 
that one sat for meals, and used it as a step 
vv^hen climbing into a bunk. The skipper 
cheerily hailed me. ''As you're in for it, 
make yourself comfortable. Sorry we can't 
do more than give you the seat to sleep on. 
But the chief thing in this ship is fish. Try 
some sprats." 

"Aye, try yon sprats," invited the Chief. 
"Ye'll get to like them well, in time." After 
the fish there was cards, in which I took no 
hand, but regarded four bent heads, so intent 
they might have been watching a ritual of 

[194] 



Off-Shore 

magic which might betray their fate; and, 
above those heads, motionless blue cirrus 
clouds of tobacco smoke wreathing the still 
lamp. The hush was so profound that we 
could have been anchored beyond the confines 
of this life. 



What the time was next morning when I 
woke I do not know, for the saloon was too 
dark to show the clock over the fireplace. 
But the skylight was a pale cube of daylight, 
and through it I could see a halyard quivering 
and swaying, apparently in a high wind. My 
bench was in a continuous tremor. 

We were ofif again. Somebody appeared 
at the doorway, a pull of cotton waste in his 
hand, and turned a negroid face, made lugu- 
brious by white lines which sweat had chan- 
nelled downwards through its coal dust. It 
looked at me, this spectre with eyes brilliant 
yet full of unutterable reproach, saw that I 
was awake, and winked slowly. It was the 
second engineer. He said it was a clear morn- 
ing. We had been under way an hour. He 
had got sixty revolutions now. He then 
receded into the gloom beyond; but material- 
ized again, or, to be exact, the white stare of 

[195] 



London River 

two disembodied eyes appeared, and the same 
voice said that it had won seventeen and six- 
pence last night, but there was something 
funny about the way the skipper shuffled 
cards. 

Feeling as though I were in one piece, I 
got up, made my joints bend again, and went 
on deck. Our ship, tilting at the immobile 
world, might have upset the morning, which 
was pouring a bath of cold air over us. The 
overcoat of the skipper, who was pacing the 
bridge, flapped in this steady current. A low 
coast was dim on either hand, hardly superior 
to the flawless glass of the Thames. By the 
look of it, we were the first ever to break the 
tranquillity of that stream. We ourselves 
made scarcely a sound; we could have been 
attempting a swift, secret and, so far, an un- 
challenged escape. The shores unfolded in a 
panorama without form. Once we spun past 
an anchored ship, or what had been a ship be- 
fore the world congealed to this filmed crystal, 
but now it was a frail ghost shrouded in the 
still folds of diaphanous night, its riding 
lights following us like eyes. In the horny 
light of that winter dawn we overhauled, one 
after another, the lamps of the Thames estuary, 
the Chapman, the Nore, and the Mouse, and 

[196] 



Off-Shore 

dropped them astern. We made a course 
east by north to where the red glints of the 
Maplin and Gunfleet lights winked in their 
iron gibbets. Above the shallows of the Bur- 
rows Shoal the masts projected awry of the 
wreck of a three-masted schooner, and they 
could have been the fingers of the drowned 
making a last clutch at nothing. 

We got abreast of Orfordness, and went 
through the gate of the North Channel upon a 
wide grey plain. We were fairly at sea. We 
were out. The Windhover, being free, I sup- 
pose, began to dance. The sun came up. 
The seas were on the march. Just behind us 
was London, asleep and unsuspecting under 
the brown depression of its canopy; and as to 
this surprise of light and space so near to 
that city, so easily entered, yet for so long 
merely an ancient rumour, an old tale of our 
streets to which the ships and the wharves 
gave credence — how shall the report of it 
sound true? Not at all, except to those who 
still hold to a faith, through all foul times, in 
the chance hints of a better world. 

A new time was beginning in such a world. 
There was a massive purple battlement on the 
sea, at a great distance, the last entrenchment 
of night; but a multitude of rays had stormed 

[197] 



London River 

it, poured through clefts and chasms in the 
wall, and escaped to the Windhover on a 
broad road that was newly laid from the sky 
to this planet. The sun was at one end of the 
road, and we were at the other. There were 
only the two of us on that road. On our port 
beam the shadow which was East Anglia be- 
came suddenly that bright shore which is 
sometimes conjectured, but is never reached. 
The Windhover drove athwart the morning, 
and her bows would ride over the horizon to 
divide it, and then the skyline joined again as 
she sank below it. We were beginning to 
live. I did not know what the skipper would 
think of it, so I did not cheer. Sometimes 
the sea did this for me, making a loud applause 
as it leaped over the prow. The trawler was 
a good ship ; you could feel that. She was as 
easy and buoyant as a thoroughbred. She 
would take a wave in a stride. I liked her 
start of surprise when she met a wave of 
unexpected speed and strength, and then 
leaped at it, and threw it, white and shouting, 
all around us. It was that part of a first 
voyage when you feel you were meant to be a 
navigator. To stand at the end of the bridge, 
rolling out over the cataracts roaring below, 
and to swing back, and out again, watching 

[198] 



Off-Shore 

the ship's head decline into a hollow of the 
seas, and then to clutch the saddle as she 
reared with a sudden twist and swing above 
the horizon, and in such a vast and illumin- 
ated theatre, was to awake to a new virtue in 
life. We were alone there. There were only 
comets of smoke on the bright wall of the sky, 
of steamers out of sight. 

At sunset we made Smith's Knoll Light, 
and dropped the land. The cluster of stars 
astern, which was a fleet of Yarmouth herring 
boats at work, went out in the dark. I had, 
for warmth and company in the wheel-house 
on the bridge, while listening to the seas get- 
ting up, only signals from Orion and the Great 
Bear, the glow of the pipe of the silent fellow 
at the wheel, and the warm shaft of light 
which streamed from somewhere in the ship's 
body and isolated the foremast as a column of 
gold. There was the monody, confident but 
subdued, the most ancient song in the world, 
of invisible waters. Sometimes there was a 
shock when she dropped into a hollow, and a 
vicious shower whipped across the glass of the 
wheel-house. I then got the sad feeling, 
much too soon, that the inhospitable North 
was greeting us. It is after sundown at sea, 
when looking through the dark to the stars, 

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London River 

listening to sounds that are as though ancient 
waters were still wandering under a sky in 
Yvrhich day has not been kindled, seeking 
coasts not yet formed, it is in such nights that 
one's thoughts are of destiny, and then the 
remembrance of our late eager activities 
brings a little smile. There being no illumin- 
ation in the wheel-house but the restricted 
glow from the binnacle, this silent comment of 
mine on man and his fate caused the helms- 
man no amusement. ^'I hope you are bring- 
ing us luck this trip," said the sailor to me. 
'Xast trip we got a poor catch. I don't know 
where the fish have got to." Somewhere, 
north-east about two hundred miles, was the 
fleet which, if I were the right sort of mascot 
to the Windhover, we should pick up on the 
evening of the next day. 



When I left the wheel-house to go below, 
it was near midnight. As I opened the heavy 
door of the house the night howled aloud at 
my appearance. The night smelt pungently 
of salt and seaweed. The hand-rail was cold 
and wet. The wind was like ice in my nose, 
and it tasted like iron. Sometimes the next 
step was at a correct distance below my feet; 

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Off-Shore 

and then all that was under me would be 
swept away. I descended into the muffled 
saloon, which was a little box enclosing light 
and warmth partially submerged in the waters. 
There it smelt of hot engine-oil and stale 
clothes. I got used to the murmuring transit 
of something which swept our outer walls in 
immense bounds, and the flying grind of the 
propeller, and the bang-clang of the rudder 
when it was struck . . . and must have gone 
to sleep. . . . 

When I woke, it was because the saloon in 
my dreams had gone mad. Perhaps it had 
been going mad for some time. Really I was 
not fully awake — it was four in the morning, 
the fire was out, and violent draughts kept 
ballooning the blanket over me — and in 
another minute I might have become quite 
aware that I had gone to sea for the first time. 
It was my bench which properly woke me. 
It fell away from me, and I, of course, went 
after it, and my impression is that I met it 
halfway on its return journey, for then there 
came the swooning sensation one feels in the 
immediate ascent of a lift. When the bench 
was as high as it could go it overbalanced, 
canting acutely, and, grabbing my blanket, 
I left diagonally for a corner of the saloon, ac- 

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London River 

companied by some sea-boots I met under the 
table. As I was slowly and carefully climb- 
ing back, the floor reversed, and I stopped 
falling when my head struck a panel. The 
panel slid gently along, and the mate's severe 
countenance regarded me from inside the 
bunk. I expected some remonstrance from a 
tired man who had been unfairly awakened 
too soon. "Hurt yourself?" he asked. "It's 
getting up outside. Dirty weather. Take 
things easy." 

I took them as easily as perhaps should be 
expected of a longshoreman. There was no 
more sleep, though no more was wanted. By 
putting out my hand to the table I managed 
to keep where I was, even when, in those mo- 
ments of greatest insecurity, the screw was 
roaring in mid-air. Our fascinating hanging 
lamp would perform the impossible, hanging 
acutely out of plumb; and then, when I was 
watching this miracle, rattle its chain and 
hang the other way. A regiment of boots on 
the floor — I suppose it was boots — would 
tramp to one corner, remain quiet for a while, 
and then clatter elsewhere in a body. To- 
wards daybreak the skipper appeared in shin- 
ing oilskins, tapped the barometer, glanced at 
me, and laughed because my pillow — which 

[202] 



Off-Shore 

was a linen bag stuffed with old magazines — 
at that moment became lower than my heels, 
and the precipitous rug tried to smother me. 
I enjoyed that laugh. 

Later still, I saw that our dark skylight was 
beginning to regain its sight. Light was 
coming through. Our lunatic saloon lamp 
was growing wan. I ventured on deck. 
When my face was no more than out of the 
hatch, what I saw was our ship's stern up- 
turned before me, with our boat lashed to it. 
It dropped out of view instantly, and exposed 
the blurred apparition of a hill in pursuit of 
us — the hill ran in to run over us — and in that 
very moment of crisis the slope of wet deck 
appeared again, and the lashed boat. The 
cold iron was wet and slippery, but I grasped 
it firmly, as though that were an essential con- 
dition of existence in such a place. 

The Windhover, too, looked so small. She 
was diminished. She did not bear herself as 
buoyantly as yesterday. Often she was not 
quick enough to escape a blow. She looked 
a forlorn trifle, and there was no aid in sight. 
I cannot say those hills, alive and deliberate 
on all sides, were waves. They were the sea. 
The dawn astern' was a narrow band of dead 
white, an effort at daybreak suddenly frus- 

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London River 

trated by night, but not altogether expunged. 
The separating black waters bulked above the 
dawn in regular upheavals, shutting out its 
pallor, and as incontinently collapsed again 
to release it to make the Windhover plainer 
in her solitude. 

The skipper waddled briskly aft, and stood 
beside me. He put his nose inside the galley. 
^^I smell coffee," he said. His charge reared, 
and pitched him against the bulwarks. 
''Whoa, you bitch," he cried cheerfully. 
"Our fleet ought not to be far off," he explain- 
ed. "Ought to see something of them soon." 
He glanced casually round the emptinesss of 
the dawn. He might have been looking for 
some one with whom he had made an appoint- 
ment at Charing Cross. He then backed into 
the hatch and went below. The big mate ap- 
peared, yawned, stooped to examine a lashed 
spar, did not give the sunrise so much as a 
glance, did not allow the ocean to see that he 
was even aware of its existence, but went for- 
ward to the bridge. 

The clouds lowered during the morning, 
and through that narrowed space between the 
sea and the sky the wind was forced at a great- 
er pace, dragging rain over the waters. Our 
fleet might have been half a mile away, and we 

[204] 



Off-Shore 

could have gone on, still looking for it. The 
day early surrendered its light, a dismal sub- 
mission to conditions that had made its brief 
existence a failure. It had nearly gone when 
we sighted another trawler. She was the 
Susie, She was smaller than the Windhover. 
We went close enough to hail the men stand- 
ing knee-deep in the wash on her deck. It 
would not be easy to forget the Susie. I shall 
always see her, at the moment when our skip- 
per began to shout through his hands at her. 
She was poised askew, in that arrested instant, 
on a glassy slope of water, with its crest foam- 
ing above her. Surge blotted her out amid- 
ships, and her streaming forefoot jutted clear. 
She plunged then into the hollow between us, 
showing us the plan of her deck, for her fun- 
nel was pointing at us. Her men bawled to 
us. They said the Susie had sighted nothing. 
Our engine-bell rang for us to part com- 
pany. Our little friend dropped astern. She 
seemed a poor little thing, with a squirt of 
steam to keep her alive in that stupendous and 
hurrying world. A man on her raised his 
arm to us in salute, and she vanished. 



[205] 



London River 

4 

The talk of our skipper, who began to be 
preoccupied and abrupt, veered to the subject 
of Jonah. We should now have been with 
our fleet, but were alone in the wilderness, and 
any course we took would be as likely as an- 
other. ^'This hasn't happened to me for 
years," he apologized. He stared about him, 
tapping the weather-dodger with his fingers, 
and whistled reflectively. He turned to the 
man at the wheel. ''Take her east for an 
hour, and then north for an hour," and wen^ 
below. 

Day returned briefly at sunset. It was an 
astonishing gift. The clouds rapidly lifted 
and the sky cleared, till the sea extended far to 
a bright horizon, hard and polished, a clear 
separation of our planet and heaven. The 
waves were still ponderous. The Windhover 
laboured heavily. We rolled over the bright 
slopes aimlessly. She would rear till the for- 
ward deck stuck up in front of us, then drop 
over, flinging us against the dodger, and the 
shock would surround her with foam that was 
an eruption of greenish light. 

The sun was a cold rayless ball halved by 
the dark sea. The wall of heaven above it 

[206] 



0£f-Shore 

was flushed and translucent marble. There 
was a silver paring of moon in a tincture of 
rose. When the sun had gone, the place it 
had left was luminous with saffron and mauve, 
and for a brief while we might have been 
alone in a vast hall with its crystalline dome 
penetrated by a glow that was without. The 
purple waters took the light from above and 
the waves turned to flames. The fountains 
that mounted at the bows and fell inboard 
came as showers of gems. (I heard after- 
wards it was still foggy in London.) And 
now, having made all I can of sunset and 
ocean, and a spray of amethysts, jacinths, 
emeralds, zircons, rubies, peridots, and sap- 
phires, it is no longer possible for me to avoid 
the saloon, the thought of which, for an ob- 
scure reason, my mind loathed. 

And our saloon, compared with the meas- 
ure of the twilight emptiness now about us, 
was no bigger than the comfort a man feels 
amid mischance when he remembers that he 
is still virtuous. The white cloth on its table, 
I noticed, as I sat down, was contaminated by 
a long and sinful life. But the men round it 
were good and hearty. I took my share of 
ham and fish on the same plate, and began to 
feel not so hungry as before. I was informed 

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London River 

that ashore we are too particular about trifles, 
because we have the room for it, but on a 
trawler there is not much room. You have to 
squeeze together, and make do with what is 
there, because fish is the most important 
passenger. My hunk of bread was placed 
where the cloth bore the imprint of a negro's 
hand. The mugs of tea were massive, and 
sweetish (I could smell that) with condensed 
milk. Did I want my tea? I noticed there 
were two men between me and the exit, and 
no room to pass. The room was hot. The 
bench was rising and falling. My soul felt 
pale and faintly apprehensive, compelling me, 
now I was beset, to take hold of it firmly, and 
to tell it that this was not the time to be a 
miserable martyr, but a coarse brute; and that, 
whether it liked it or not, I was going to feed 
at once on fish, ham, and sickly liquor, and 
heaven help us if it failed me before these 
sailors. It made no response, being a thin 
nonconformist soul, so I had to leave it, and 
alone I advanced on the food. As so often 
happens, the conquest was a little less hard 
than it appeared to be. I progressed, though 
slowly, and at last was sufficiently disengaged 
from my task to count the minutes moving at 
their funeral pace to the end of the meal. 

[208] 



0£f-Shore 

The heat of the room mounted. The move- 
ments of the ship continued to throw my 
stomach against the edge of the table. 

My companions, however, were in no hurry 
to move. They discussed, among other things, 
Hull, and its unfortunate system of sanitation. 
While this gossip, which was explicit with 
exuberant detail, was engaging us, I sum- 
moned my scientific mind, which is not con- 
nected with my soul, to listen to what was 
being said, and the rest of me was deaf. They 
went on to tell each other about other trawlers 
and other crews. Other ships and men, I 
heard, had most of the luck. ''The fish 
follow some of 'em about," complained the 
skipper. 'T should like to know how it's 
done." 

''They ought to follow us," replied the 
second engineer. "When I went down to 
take over this morning, Mac was singing 
Scotch songs. What more could we do 
below?" 

"It's a grand life," nodded his superior's 
polished bald head. "Aye, there's guid 
reason for singing. Sing to yon codfish, 
y'ken." 

The skipper looked at the engineer in doubt- 
ful innocence. "Well, I wish singing would 

[209] 



London River 

do it," he said gravely. "I don't know. 
How do you account for some fellows getting 
most of the luck? Their ships are the same, 
and they don't know any more." 

Mac shook his head. ''The owners think 
they do. There's their big catches, y'ken. 
Ye'll no convince owners that the sea bottom 
isna' wet and onsairten." 

The rosy face of the skipper became darker, 
and there was a spark in his eyes. This was 
unfair. ''But dammit, man, you don't mean 
to say the owners are right? Do these chaps 
know any more? Look at old Rumface, old 
Billy Higgs. Got enough women to make 
him hate going into any port. Can't be happy 
ashore unless he's too drunk to know one 
woman from another. What does he do? 
Can't go to sea without taking his trawler 
right over all the fish there is. Is that his 
sense? Ain't God good to him? Shows him 
the fish every time." 

The engineer stood up, bending his head 
beneath a beam, crooking an elbow to consider 
one hairy arm. "Ah weel, I wouldna call it 
God. Ye canna tell. Man Billy has his last 
trip to make. Likely he'll catch fish that'd 
frighten Hull. Aye." 

The skipper moved impatiently, made noises 

[210] 



Off-Shore 

in his throat, rose, and both went out. The 
mate, who had been chewing and looking at 
nothing all the time, chuckled. 

T|he mate pulled off his big boots, and 
climbed into his bunk. The steward cleared 
the table. I had the saloon to myself, and 
tried to read from a magazine I extracted 
from my pillow. The first story was rollick- 
ing of the sea, and I have never seen more 
silly or such dreary lies in print. And the 
others were about women, magazine women, 
and the land, that magazine land which is 
not of this earth. The bench still heaved, 
and there was a new smell of sour pickles. I 
think a jar had upset in a store cupboard. 
Perhaps I should feel happier in the wheel- 
house. It was certain the wheel-house would 
not smell of vinegar, boots, and engine oil. It 
would have its own disadvantages — it would 
be cold and damp — and the wind and seas on 
the lively deck had to be faced on the way 
to it. The difficulty there is in placing the 
second course on London's cosy dinner-tables 
began to surprise me. 

Our wooden shelter, the wheel-house, is ten 
feet above the deck, with windows through 
which I could look at the night, and imagine 
the rest. I had, to support me, the mono- 

[211] 



London River 

syllabic skipper and a helmsman with nothing 
to say. I saw one of them when, drawing 
hard on his pipe, its glow outlined a bodyless 
face. The wheel chains rattled in their chan- 
nels. There was a clang when a sea wrenched 
the rudder. I clung to a window-strap, flung 
back to look upwards through a window which 
the ship abruptly placed above my head, then 
thrown forward to see wreaths of water speed- 
ing below like ghosts. The stars jolted back 
and forth in wide arcs. There were explo- 
sions at the bows, and the ship trembled and 
hesitated. Occasionally the skipper split the 
darkness with a rocket, and we gazed round 
the night for an answer. The night had no 
answer to give. We were probably nearing 
the North Pole. About midnight, the silent 
helmsman put away his pipe, as a preliminary 
to answering a foolish question of mine, and 
said, ^'Sometimes it happens. It's bound to. 
You can see for ye'self. They're little things, 
these trawlers. Just about last Christmas — 
wasn't it about Christmas-time, Skipper? — 
the Mavis left the fleet to go home. Boilers 
wrong. There was one of our hands, Jim 
Budge, who was laid up, and he reckoned he'd 
better get home quick. So he joined her. 
We were off the Tail of the Dogger, and it 

[212] 



Off-Shore 

blew that night. Next morning Jim's mate 
swore Jim's bunk had been laid in. It was 
wet. He said the Mavis had gone. I could 
see the bunk was wet all right, but what are 
ventilators for? Chance it, the Mavis never 
got home. A big sea to flood the engine-room, 
and there she goes." 



After the next daybreak time stood still — or 
rather, I refused to note its passage. For that 
morning I made out the skipper, drenched 
with spray, and his eyes bloodshot, no doubt 
through weariness and the weather, watching 
me from the saloon doorway. I did not ask 
any questions, but pretended I was merely 
turning in my sleep. It is probably better not 
to ask the man who has succeeded in losing 
you where you are, particularly when his eyes 
are bloodshot and he is wondering what the 
deuce he shall do about it. And greater 
caution still is required when his reproachful 
silence gives you the idea that he thinks you a 
touch of ill-luck in his enterprise. My com- 
panions, I believe, regretted' I had not been 
omitted. I tried, therefore, to be inconspic- 
uous, and went up to seclude myself at the 

[213] 



London River 

back of the boat on the poop, there to under- 
study a dog which is sorry it did it. Not 
adverse fate itself could show a more mis- 
anthropic aspect than the empty overcast 
waste around us. It was useless to appeal to 
it. It did vouchsafe us one ship that morning, 
a German trawler with a fir tree lashed to her 
deck, ready for Christmas morning, I suppose, 
when perhaps they would tie herrings to its 
twigs. But she was no good to us. And the 
grey animosity granted us three others during 
the afternoon, and they were equally useless, 
for they had not sighted our fleet for a week. 
All that interested me was the way the look- 
out on the bridge picked out a mark, which I 
could not see, for it was obscured where sea 
and sky were the same murk, and called it a 
ship. Long before I could properly discern 
it, the look-out behaved as though he knew 
all about it. But it was never the sign we 
wanted. We had changed our course so often 
that I was beginning to believe that nobody 
aboard could make a nearer guess at our 
position than the giddy victim in blindman's- 
buff . A sextant was never used. Apparently 
these fishermen found their way about on a 
little mental arithmetic compounded of speed, 
time, and the course. That leaves a large 

[214] 



Off-Shore 

margin for error. So if they felt doubtful 
they got a plummet, greased it, and dipped it 
overboard. When it was hauled up they in- 
spected whatever might be sticking to the tal- 
low, and at once announced our position. At 
first I felt sceptical. It was as though one 
who had got lost with you in London might 
pick up a stone in an unknown thoroughfare, 
and straightway announce the name of that 
street. That would be rather clever. But I 
discovered my fishermen could do something 
like it. 

Our skipper no longer appeared at meals. 
He was on the bridge day and night. He 
acted quite well a pose of complete indiffer- 
ence, and said no more than: ''This has not 
happened to me for years." He repeated this 
slowly at reasonable intervals. But he had 
lost the nimble impulse to chat about little 
things, and also his look of peering and in- 
nocent curiosity. As now he did not come to 
our table, the others spoke of Billingsgate 
carriers, such as ours, which had driven about 
the Dogger till there was no more in the 
bunkers than would take them to Hull to get 
more coal. From the way they spoke I 
gathered they would crawl into port, in such 
circumstances, without flags, and without 

[215] 



London River 

singing. This gave my first trip an appear- 
ance I had never expected. Imagination, 
which is clearly of little help in geography, 
had always pictured the Dogger as a sea 
where you could hail another trawler as you 
would a cab in London. A vessel might 
reasonably expect to find there a fish-trunk it 
had left behind. But here we were with our 
ship plunging round the compass merely ex- 
pectant of luck, and each wave looking exactly 
like the others. 

But at last we had them. We spoke a rival 
fleet of trawlers. Their admiral cried 
through a speaking-trumpet that he had left 
''ours" at six that morning twenty miles NNE., 
steaming west. It was then eleven o'clock. 
Hopefully the Windhover put about. We 
held on for three hours at full speed, but saw 
nothing but the same waves. The skipper 
then rather violently addressed the Dogger, 
and said he was going below. The mate 
asked what course he should steer. ''Take 
the damned ship where you like," said the 
skipper. "I'm going to sleep." He was 
away ten minutes. He reappeared, and re- 
sumed his silent parade of the bridge. The 
helmsman grinned at the mate. By then the 
wind had fallen, the seas were more deliber- 

[216] 



Off-Shore 

ate; there came a suffusion of thin sunlight, 
insufficient and too late to expand our outlook, 
for the night began to fill the hollows of the 
Dogger almost at once, and soon there was 
nothing to be seen but the glimmer of break- 
ing waves. 



There is nothing to be done with an adven- 
ture which has become a misprise than to 
enjoy it that way instead. What did I care 
when they complained at breakfast of the 
waste of rockets the night before? What did 
that matter to me when the skylight above 
our morning coffee was open at last, really 
open? Fine weather for December! Across 
that patch of blue, which was a peep into 
eternity, I saw drift a bird as white as sanctity. 
And did it matter if the imprints on our 
tablecloth of negroes' thumbs were more num- 
erous and patent than ever, in such a light? 
Not in the least. For I myself had long since 
given up washing, as a laborious and unsatis- 
factory process, and was then cutting up cake 
tobacco with the rapture of an acolyte pre- 
paring the incense. If this was what was 
meant by getting lost on the Dogger, then the 
method, if only its magic could be formulated, 

[217] 



London River 

would make the fortunes of the professional 
fakirs of happiness in the capitals of the rich. 
Yet mornings of such a quality cannot be 
purchased, nor even claimed as the reward of 
virtue. 

On deck it was a regal day, leisurely, im- 
mense, and majestic. The wind was steady 
and generous. The warm sunlight danced. 
I should not have been surprised to have seen 
Zeus throned on the splendid summit of the 
greatest of those rounded clouds, contem- 
plative of us, finger on cheek, smiling with 
approval of the scene below — melancholy ap- 
proval, for we would remind him of those 
halcyon days whose refulgence turned pale 
and sickly when Paul, that argumentative 
zealot, came to provide a world, already think- 
ing more of industry and State politics than 
of the gods, with a hard-wearing theology 
which would last till Manchester came. For 
the Windhover had drifted into a time and 
place as innocent of man's highest achieve- 
ments as is joy of death. The wind and sea 
were chanting. The riding of the ship kept 
time to that measure. The vault was tur- 
quoise, and the moving floor was cobalt. The 
white islands of the Olympians were in the 
sky. 

[218] 



Off-Shore 

Hour after hour our lonely black atom 
moved over that vast floor, with nothing in 
sight, of course, in a day that had been left 
over from earth's earlier and more innocent 
time, till a little cloud formed in the north. 
That cloud did not rise. It blew towards us 
straight over the seas, rigid and formless; 
becoming at last a barque under full sail, 
heading east of south of us. She was, when 
at a distance, a baffling mass of canvas, from 
which a square-sail occasionally heliographed. 
She got abeam of us. Before the clippers 
have quite gone, it is proper to give grace for 
the privilege of having seen one, superlative 
as the ship of romance, and in such a time and 
place. She was a cloud that, when it mounted 
the horizon like the others, instead of 
floating into the meridian, moved over the 
seas to us, an immutable billow of luminous 
mist blown forward on the wind. She might 
have risen at any moment. Her green hull 
had the sheer of a sea hollow. Her bows 
pressed continually onward, like the crest of 
a wave curving forward to break, but held, 
as though enchanted. Sometimes, when her 
white mass heeled from us under the pressure 
of the wind, a red light flashed from her sub- 
merged body. She passed silently, a shining 

[219] 



London River 
phantom, and at last vanished, as phantoms do. 

7 

When the boots, exploded on the saloon 
floor by the petulant mate, woke me, it was 
three of a morning which, for my part, was 
not in the almanac. "We're bewitched," the 
mate said, climbing over me into his cupboard. 
"I never thought I should want to see our 
fleet so much." 

"Aye," remarked the chief engineer, who 
came shuflSing in then for some sleep, "ye'li 
find that fleet quick, or the stokers are giving 
orders. D'ye think a ship is driven by the 
man at the wheel? No' that I want to smell 
Hull." 

A kick of the ship over'turned the fire- 
shovel, and I woke again to look with surprise 
at so small a cause of a terrible sound, and 
was leaving the shovel to its fate when it 
came to life, and began to crawl stealthily 
over the floor. It was an imperative duty 
to rise and imprison it. When that was for- 
gotten the steward arrived, and roused me to 
watch the method of setting a breakfast-table 
at sea; but I had seen all that before, and 
climbed out of the saloon. There are mo- 
ments in a life afloat when the kennel and 

[220] 



Off-Shore 

chain of the house-dog appear to have their 
merits. The same wash was still racing past 
outside, and the ship moving along. The 
halyards were shaking in the cold. The 
funnel was still abruptly rocking. A sailor 
was painting the starboard stanchions. A sto- 
ker was going forward off duty, in his shirt and 
trousers, indifferent to the cruel wind which 
bulged and quivered his thin rags. The skip- 
per was on the bridge, his hands in the pock- 
ets of his flapping overcoat, still searching the 
distance for what was not there. A train of 
gulls was weaving about over our wake. A 
derelict fish-trunk floated close to us, with a 
great black-backed gull perched on it. He 
cocked up one eye at me when he drew level, 
crouched for flight, but perhaps saw on my 
face the reason why I prefer working to- 
morrow, and contemptuously stayed where he 
was. Then I noticed the skipper looking 
back at the bird. He nodded to it, and cried : 
^'There goes a milestone. The fleet is about 
somewhere." I danced with caution along 
the treacherous deck, where one day that voy- 
age a sea picked up two men and stranded 
them on top of the engine-room casing, and 
got up with the master. He had just ordered 
the ship to be put over to a trawler in sight. 

[221] 



London River 

With the seas so swift and ponderous I com- 
pletely forgot the cold wind in watching the 
two lively ships being manoeuvred till they 
were within earshot. When the engines were 
stopped the steering had to be nicely calcula- 
ted, or erratic waves brought them danger- 
ously close, or else took them out of call. 
Our new friend had not seen '^our lot," but 
had left a fleet with an unknown house-flag 
ten miles astern. We surged forward again. 

We steamed for two hours, and then the 
pattern of a trawler's smoke was seen ahead 
traced on a band of greenish brilliance which 
divided the sea from the sky. Almost at once 
other faint tracings multiplied there. In a 
few minutes we could make out plainly within 
that livid narrow outlet between the sea and 
the heavy clouds a concourse of midget ships. 

''There they are," breathed the skipper, 
after a quick inspection through his glasses. 

In half an hour we were in the midst of a 
fleet of fifty little steamers, just too late to 
take our place as carrier to them for London's 
daily market. As we steamed in, another 
carrier, which had left London after us, 
hoisted her signal pennant, and took over that 
job. 

While still our ship was under way, boats 

[222] 



Off-Shore 

put out from the surrounding trawlers, and 
converged on us for our outward cargo, the 
empty fish-trunks. That intense band of light 
which had first betrayed the smoke of the fleet 
eroded upwards into the low, slaty roof of 
nimbus till the gloom was dissolved to the 
zenith. The incubus vanished; the sun 
flooded us. At last only white feathers were 
left in the sky. I felt I had known and loved 
these trawlers for years. All round us were 
ships' boats, riding those sweeping seas in a 
gyrating and delirious lunacy; and in each 
were two jovial fishermen, who shouted separ- 
ate reasons to our skipper for ^'the week off" 
he had taken. 

These boats came at us like a swarm of 
assailants, swooping downhill on us, swerv- 
ing, recoiling, and falling away, rising swiftly 
above us again for a charge, and then career- 
ing at us with abandon on the next declivity 
of glass. A boat would hesitate above us, 
poised and rocking on the snowy ridge of an 
upheaval, and vanish as the Windhover 
canted away. Then we rolled towards her, 
and there she was below us, in a smooth and 
transient hollow. Watching for their chances, 
snatched out of luck by skill and audacity, our 
men fed the clamorous boats with Empties; 

[223] 



London River 

the boxes often fell just at the moment when 
the open boat was snatched away, and then 
were swept off. The shouted jokes were 
broadened and strengthened to fit that riot 
and uproar. This sudden robust life, follow- 
ing the routine of our subdued company on 
its lonely and disappointed vigils in a deserted 
sea, the cheery men countering and mocking 
aloud the sly tricks of their erratic craft, a 
multitude of masts and smoking funnels 
around us swaying in various arcs against a 
triumphant sky, the clamorous desperation of 
clouds of wheeling kittiwakes, herring-gulls, 
black-backed gulls and gannets, and all in 
that pour of hard and crystalline northern 
sunlight, was as though the creative word had 
been spoken only five minutes before. We, 
and all this, had just come. I wanted to 
laugh and cheer. 

'8 

There is, we know, a pleasure more refined 
to be got from looking at a chart than from 
any impeccable modern map. Maps today 
are losing their attraction, for they permit of 
no escape, even to fancy. Maps do not allow 
us to forget that there are established and 
well-ordered governments up to the shores of 

[224] 



Oiff-Shore 

the Arctic Ocean, waiting to restrict, to tax, 
and to punish us, and that their police patrol 
the tropical forests. But consider the legends 
on a chart even of the North Sea, of the world 
beneath the fathoms — the Silver Pits, the 
Dowsing Ground, the Leman Bank, the Great 
Fisher Ground, the Horn Reef, the Witch 
Ground, and the Great Dogger Bank! 
Strange, that indefinable implication of a 
word! I remember that, when a child, I was 
awake one night listening to a grandfather's 
clock talking quietly to itself in its long box, 
and a brother sat up in bed and whispered: 
^'Look, the Star in the East.'' I turned, and 
one bright eye of the night was staring through 
the window. Heaven knows into what pro- 
fundity of ancestral darkness my brother's 
whisper had fallen, nor what it stirred there, 
but an awe, or a fear, was wakened in me 
which was not mine, for I remember I could 
not explain it, even though, at the time, the 
anxious direct question was put to me. Nor 
can I now. It would puzzle a psycho-analyst 
most assured of the right system for indexing 
secret human motives to disengage one shadow 
'from another in an ancestral darkness. That 
is why I merely put down here the names to 
be found on a chart of the North Sea, and 

[225] 



London River 

say no more about it, being sure they will 
mean nothing except to those to whom they 
mean something. Those words, like certain 
moonbeams, which stir in us that not ourselves 
which makes for righteousness, or lunacy, 
combine only by chance. The combination 
which unlocks the secret cannot be stated, or 
it would not work. When there is a for- 
tuitous coincidence of the magic factors, the 
result is as remarkable to us as it is to those 
who think they know us. When I used to 
stand on London's foreshore, gazing to what 
was beyond our street lamps, the names on the 
chart had a meaning for me which is outside 
the usual methods of human communication. 
The Dogger Bank! 

Here then it was, yet still to be seen only by 
faith. It was like Mrs. Harris. I had the 
luck to discover that I should lose nothing 
through my visit; and every traveller knows 
how much he gains when the place he has 
wished to visit allows him to take away from 
it no less than what he brought with him. 
The Bank was twenty fathoms under us. We 
saw it proved at times when a little fine white 
sand came up, or fleshy yellow fingers, called 
sponge by the men, which showed we were 
over the pastures of the haddock. That was 

[226] 



Off-Shore 

all we saw of a foundered region of prehis- 
toric Europe, where once there was a ridge 
in the valley of that lost river to which the 
Rhine and Thames were tributaries. Our 
forefathers, prospecting that attractive and 
remunerative plateau of the Dogger, on their 
pilgrimage to begin making our England 
what it is, caught deer where we were netting 
cod. I almost shuddered at the thought, as 
though even then I felt the trawl of another 
race of men, who had strangely forgotten all 
our noble deeds and precious memories, catch- 
ing in the ruin of St. Stephen's Tower, and 
the strangers, unaware of what august relic 
was beneath them, cursing that obstruction to 
their progress. Anyhow, we should have the 
laugh of them there; but these aeons of time 
are desperate waters into which to sink one's 
thought. It sinks out of sight. It goes 
down to dark nothing. 

Well, it happened to be the sun of my day 
just then, and our time for catching cod, with 
the reasonable hope, too, that we should find 
the city still under St. Stephen's Tower when 
we got back, as a place to sell our catch. 

Our empty boxes were discharged. Led by 
the admiral, the Windhover — with the rest of 
the fleet — lowered her trawl, and went dip- 

[227] 



London River 

ping slowly and quietly over the hills, towing 
her sunken net. The admiral of a fishing- 
fleet is a great man. All is in his hands. He 
chooses the grounds. Our admiral, it was 
whispered to me, was the wizard of the north. 
The abundant fish-pastures were revealed to 
him in his dreams. It was my last evening 
on the Bank. The day had been wonder- 
fully fine for winter and a sea that is notor- 
iously evil. At twilight the wind dropped, 
the heave of the waters decreased. The scat- 
tered fleet, gliding through the hush, carried 
red, green, and white planets. The ships 
which lay in the western glow were black 
and simple shapes. Those to the east of us 
were remarkable with a chromatic promin- 
ence, and you thought, while watching them, 
that till that moment you had not really seen 
them. Presently the moon cleared the edge 
of the sea, a segment of frozen light, and 
moored to our stern with a quivering, ghostly 
line. 

Coloured rockets sailed upwards from the 
admiral when he changed his mind and his 
course, and then the city of mobile streets 
altered its plan, and rewove its constellation. 
At midnight white flares burned forward on 
all the boats. The trawls were to be hauled. 

[228] 



Off-Shore 

Our steam-winch began to bang its cogs in the 
heavy work of lifting the net. All hands 
assembled to see what would be our luck. 
The light sent a silver lane through the night, 
and men broke through the black walls of 
that brilliant separation of the darkness, and 
vanished on the other side. Leaning over- 
side, I could see the pocket of our trawl 
drawing near, still some fathoms deep, a phos- 
phorescent and flashing cloud. It came in- 
board, and was suspended over the deck, a 
bulging mass, its bottom was unfastened, and 
out gushed our catch, slithering over the deck, 
convulsive in the scuppers. The mass of 
blubber and plasm pulsed with an elfish glow. 



We were homeward bound. The flat sea 
was dazzling with reflected sunshine, and a 
shade had to be erected over the binnacle for 
the man at the wheel. It might have been 
June, yet we had but few days to Christmas. 
The noon ceiling was a frail blue, where 
gauze was suspended in motionless loops and 
folds. The track of the sun was incandescent 
silver. A few sailing vessels idled in the 
North Channel, their sails slack ; but we could 

[229] 



London River 

not see a steamer in what is one of the world's 
busiest fairways. We ran on a level keel, 
and there was no movement but the tremor 
of the engines. We should catch the tide at 
the Shipwash, and go up on it to Billingsgate 
and be home by midnight. How foolish it is 
to portion your future, at sea! 

It was when I was arranging what I should 
do in the later hours of that day, when we 
were at Billingsgate, that the skipper, staring 
round the North Channel, said to me: '^It 
looks as though London had been wiped out 
since we left it. Where's the ships?" 

The Maplin watched us pass with its red 
eye. We raised all the lights true and clear. 
I went below, and we were talking of London, 
and the last trains, when the engine-room 
telegraph gave us a great shock. ''Stop her!" 
we heard the watch cry below. 

I don't know how we got on deck. There 
were too many on the companion ladder at 
the same time. While we were struggling 
upwards we heard that frantic bell ring often 
enough to drive the engine-room people dis- 
tracted. I got to the ship's side in time to 
see a liner's bulk glide by. She would have 
been invisible but for her strata of lights. 
She was just beyond our touch. A figure on 

[230] 



Off-Shore 

her, high over us, came to her rail, distinct in 
the blur of the light of a cabin behind him, 
and shouted at us. I remember very w^ell 
what he said, but it is forbidden to put down 
such words here. The man at our wheel paid 
no attention to him, that danger being now 
past, and so of no importance. He continued 
to spin the spokes desperately, because, though 
we could not see the ships about us, we could 
hear everywhere the alarm of their bells. 
We had run at eleven knots into a bank of fog 
which seemed full of ships. The moon was 
looking now over the top of the wall of fog, 
yet the Windhover, which, with engines re- 
versed, seemed to be going ahead with f ri^ght- 
ful velocity, drove into an opacity in which 
there was nothing but the warning sounds of 
a great fear of us. I imagined in the dark 
the loom of impending bodies, and straining 
overside in an effort to make them out, listen- 
ing to the murmur of the stream, nervously 
fanned the fog with my hat in a ridiculous 
effort to clear it. Twice across our bows 
perilous shadows arose, sprinkled with stars, 
yet by some luck they drifted silently by us, 
and the impact we expected and were braced 
for was not felt. 

[231] 



London River 

I don't know how long it was before the 
Windhover lost way, but we anchored at last, 
and our own bell began to ring. When our 
unseen neighbours heard the humming of our 
exhaust, their frantic appeal subsided, and 
only now and then they gave their bells a 
shaking, perhaps to find whether we answered 
from the same place. There was an absolute 
silence at last, as though all had crept stealth- 
ily away, having left us, lost and solitary, in 
the fog. We felt confident there would be a 
clearance soon, so but shrouded our navigation 
lights. But the rampart of fog grew higher, 
veiled the moon, blotted it out, expunged the 
last and highest star. We were imprisoned. 
We lay till morning, and there was only the 
fog, and ourselves, and a bell-buoy somewhere 
which tolled dolefully. 

And morning was but a weak infiltration 
into our prison. A steadfast inspection was 
necessary to mark even the dead water over- 
side. The River was the same colour as the 
fog. For a fortnight we had been without 
rest. We had become used to a little home 
which was unstable, and sometimes delirious, 
and a sky that was always falling, and an 
earth that rose to meet the collapse. Here 
we were on a dead level, still and silent, with 

[232] 



Off-Shore 

the men whispering, and one felt inclined to 
reel with giddiness. We were fixed to a 
dumb, unseen river of a world that was blind. 

There was one movement. It was that of 
the leisurely motes of the fog. We watched 
them — there was nothing else to do — for a 
change of wind. A change did not seem 
likely, for the rigging was hoar with frost, 
and ice glazed our deck. 

Sometimes the fog would seem to rise a few 
feet. It was a cruel deception to play on the 
impatient. A mere cork, a tiny dark object 
like that, drifting along some distance out, 
would make a focal point in the fog, and 
would give the illusion of a clearance. Once, 
parading the deck as the man on watch, giving 
an occasional shake to the bell, I went suddenly 
happy with the certainty that I was now to be 
the harbinger of good tidings to those below 
playing cards. A vague elevated line ap- 
peared to starboard. I watched it grow into 
definition, a coast showing through a haze 
that was now dissolving. Up they all tumbled 
at my shout. They stared at the wonder 
hopefully and silently. The coast became 
higher and darker, and the skipper was turn- 
ing to give orders — and then our hope turned 
into a wide path on the ebbing River made 



London River 

by cinders moving out on the tide. The 
cinders passed. We re-entered our silent 
tomb. There had been no sign of our many 
neighbours of the night before, but suddenly 
we heard some dreadful moans, the tentative 
efforts of a body surprised by pain, and these 
sounds shaped, hilariously lachrymose, into 
a steam hooter playing '^Auld Lang Syne," 
and then ''Home, Sweet Home." There 
followed an astonishing amount of laughter 
from a hidden audience. The prisoners in 
the neighbouring cells were there after all, 
and were even jolly. The day thereafter was 
mute, the yellow walls at evening deepened 
to ochre, to umber, and became black, except 
where our riding lights made luminous circles. 
Each miserable watcher who came down to 
the saloon that night, muffled and sparkling 
With frost, to get a drink of hot coffee, just 
drank it, and went on deck again without a 
word. 

The motes next morning went drifting 
leisurely on the same light air, interminable. 
Our prison appeared even narrower. Then 
once again a clearance was imagined. Our 
skipper thought he saw a lane along the River, 
and up-anchored. The noise of our cable 
awoke a tumult of startled bells. 

[234] 



Ofif-Shore 

Ours was a perishable cargo. We were 
much overdue. Our skipper was willing to 
take any risk — what a good master mariner 
would call a reasonable risk — to get home; 
and so, when a deck hand, on the third morn- 
ing, with the thawing fog dripping from his 
moustache, appeared in the saloon with the 
news that it was clearing a little, the master 
decided he would go. 

I then saw, from the deck of the Windhover, 
so strange a vision that it could not be related 
to this lower sphere of ours. It could be 
thought that dawn's bluish twilight radiated 
from the Windhover, We were the luminary, 
and our faint aura revealed, through the malt- 
ing veil, an outer world that had no sky, no 
plane, no bounds. It was void. There was 
no River, except that small oval of glass on 
which rested our ship, like a model. 

The universe, which that morning had only 
begun to form in the void, was grouped about 
us. This was the original of mornings. We 
were its gravitational point. It was inert and 
voiceless. It was pregnant with unawakened 
shapes, dim surprising shadows, the sugges- 
tions of forms. Those near to us more nearly 
approached the shapes we knew in another 
life. Those beyond, diminishing and fainting 

[235] 



London River 

in the obscurity of the dawn, were beyond re- 
membrance and recognition. The Wind- 
hover alone was substantial and definite. But 
placed about us, suspended in a night that 
was growing translucent, were the shadows 
of what might once have been ships, perhaps 
were ships to be, but were then steamers and 
sailers without substance, waiting some crea- 
tive word, shrouded spectres that had left the 
wrecks of their old hulls below, their voyages 
finished, and were waiting to begin a new 
existence, having been raised to our level in 
a new world boundless and serene, with un- 
plumbed deeps beneath them. There, on our 
level, we maintained them in their poise with 
our superior gravity and our certain body, 
giving them light, being what sun there was 
in this new system in another sky. Above 
them there was nothing, and around them was 
blind distance, and below them the abyss of 
space. Their lights gathered to our centre, 
an incoming of delicate and shining mooring 
lines. 

It was all so silent, too. But our incoming 
cable shattered the spell, and when our siren 
warned them that we were moving, a wild 
pealing commenced which accompanied us 
on the long drift up to Gravesend. There 

[236] 



Off-Shore 

were eight miles of ships: barges, colliers, 
liners, clippers, cargo steamers, ghost after 
ghost took form ahead, and then went astern. 
More than once the fog thickened again, but 
the skipper never took way off her while he 
could make out a ship ahead of us. We 
drifted stern first on the flood, with half-turns 
of the propeller for steering purchase, till a 
boatman, whom we hailed, cried that we were 
off Gravesend. And was there any one for 
the shore? 

There was. I took no more risks. I had 
been looking for that life-boat. And what 
a thing it was to have solid paving-stones under 
one's feet again. There were naphtha flares 
in the fog, dingy folk in muddy ways, and 
houses that kept to one place. There was a 
public-house, too. Outside that place I re- 
membered the taste of everlasting fried fish, 
and condensed milk in weak tea; and so en- 
tered, and corrected the recollection with a 
glass of port — several glasses, to make sure 
of it — and that great hunk of plum-cake which 
I had occasionally seen in a dream. Besides, 
this was Christmas Eve. 



V'^zi^ 



XL An Old Lloyd's Register 



XL An Old Lloyd's Register 

WITH the sensation that I had survived 
into a strange and a hostile era that 
had nothing to do with me, for its 
affairs were not mine, I was inside a sub- 
marine, during the War, talking to her com- 
mander. He was unravelling for me the 
shining complexity of his ''box of tricks," as 
he called his ship. He was sardonic (there 
was no doubt he was master of the brute he so 
lightly villified), and he was blithe, and he 
illustrated his scientific monologue with stories 
of his own experiences in the Heligoland 
Bight. These, to me, were like the bedevil- 
ments of those dreams from which we groan to 
awake, but cannot. The curious doings of this 
new age, I thought as I listened to him, would 
have just the same interest for me as the relics 
of an extinct race of men, except for the ur- 
gent remembrance that one of the monstrous 
accidents this child knows of might happen 
now. That made an acute difference. This 
was not nightmare, nor ridiculous romance, 

[241] 



London River 

but actuality. And as I looked at this mock- 
ing youngster, I saw he was like the men of 
that group on the Queen Mary who were 
similarly mocking, for my benefit, but a few 
weeks before, their expert share in forward- 
ing the work we had given them in this new 
age; and then where were they? Ships I 
knew, but not such ships as these, nor such 
work. 

Another officer joined us, an older man, and 
said this to him was strange navigation. He 
was a merchant seaman. He had served his 
time in sailing ships. I asked him to name 
some of them, having the feeling that I could 
get back to the time I knew if I could but hail 
the ghost, with another survivor from the past, 
of one of those forgotten ships. "Well," he 
replied, "there was the Cutty Sark/' 

If he had said the Golden Hind I should 
not have been more astonished. In a sense, 
it was the same thing. The Cutty Sark was 
in the direct line with the Elizabethan ships, 
but at the end. That era, though it closed so 
recently, was already as far as a vague mem- 
ory. The new sea engines had come, and here 
we were with them, puzzled and embarrassed, 
having lost our reasonable friends. I told 
him I had known the Cutty Sark, and had 

[242] 



An Old Lloyd's Register 

seen that master of hers — a character who 
went about Poplar in a Glengarry cap — who 
gave one of her masts (the mizzen, I think) 
a golden rooster, after he had driven her from 
Sydney Heads to the Channel to break the 
record — Captain Woodget. His men said it 
was like living in a glass house. 

I recalled to him that once, when my busi- 
ness was concerned with bills of lading and 
freight accounts, I was advised to ship four 
hundred cases to Sydney, New South Wales; 
and one-half of that consignment, my instruc- 
tions ran, was to arrive a month before the 
other. The first lot went in a modern steel 
barque, the Cairnhulg. (''I have seen her," 
said this submarine officer). More than 
a fortnight later, being too young to remember 
that the little Cutty Sark had been one of 
the China tea clippers, I shipped the last half 
of the consignment in her. But she disor- 
dered all the careful plans of the consignees. 
She got in a fortnight ahead of the Cairnbulg. 

The effect of that casual recollection on the 
submarine officer was distinctly unwarlike. 
This memory, and not his present work, might 
have been the real thing. He knew Wood- 
get, the man in the Glengarry. He wanted to 
know more; ever so much more. He men- 

[243] 



London River 

tioned other ships and masters, to induce me. 
I got the idea that he would let his mind, at 
least, escape into that time, if only I would 
help him to let it go. But there was that po- 
tent and silent enigma about us. . . . 

No such escape for him. We have fash- 
ioned other ships, and must use them. 
What we have conjured up compels us to live 
with it. But when you do not go to sea you 
may have what ships you like. There is 
some but not much interest in the reappear- 
ance in the newspapers of the sailing lists; a 
few of the old names appear again, though 
new ships bear them. But late at night, 
when a westerly wind with rain turns for me a 
neighbouring yew tree into an invisible surge, 
then it is the fortune of one who remembers 
such as' the Cutty Sark to choose different 
ships and other times. Why not choose them? 
They were comely ships, and now their time 
seems fair. Who would care to remember the 
power and grey threat of a modern warship, 
or the exotic luxury of a liner of this new 
era? Nobody who remembers the gracious- 
ness of the clippers, nor the pride and content 
of the seamen who worked them. To aid the 
illusion of the yew, I have one of those books 
which are not books, a Lloyd's Register of 

[244] 



An Old Lloyd's Register 

Shipping for 1880, that by some unknown cir- 
cuitous route found its way from its first owner 
in Madras to my suburb. It goes very 
well with the surge of yew, when westerly 
weather comes to unite them. 

I should like to know how that book got to 
London. Somewhere in it is the name of the 
ship which carried it. Anyhow, I think I can 
make out in it the houseflag of that ship. It, 
was, I believe, one of J. H. Allan's teak-built 
craft, a forgotten line — the Rajah of Cochin, 
the Copenhagen, the Lincelles, — though 
only just before the War, in the South-West 
India Dock, I met a stranger, a seaman look- 
ing for work, who regretted its disappearance, 
and the new company-owned steamers; for he 
said they were good ships, ''but more than 
that," he told me, "Allan was an old gentle- 
man who knew his own ships, and knew his 
men." This stranger said you forget a ship 
now as soon as you are paid off, ''and glad 
to," and "you don't ever know who owns her, 
even if there's a strike. Parsons and old 
maids and Cardiff sharks, I reckon." 

Very likely. But what sharks once were in 
it have all disappeared from my Register. It 
belongs to those days when, if you went to 
New Zealand, you had to go by sailer; when 

[245] 



London River 

the East India Dock had an arcade of jio- 
booms and bowsprits, with sometimes a var- 
nished shark's tail terminal — the Euterpe, 
Jessie Re adman, Wanganui, Waimea, Wai- 
mate, Opawa, Margaret Galbraith, Helen 
Denny, Lutterworth, and Hermione. There 
were others. What is in these names? But 
how can we tell? There were personal figure- 
heads, there were shapely forms, each with 
its own narrative of adventure, there was 
the undiscovered sea, and there was youth; 
and these have gone. 

It is all very well to say that the names and 
mere words in this old Register have no more 
meaning today than a railway time-table of 
the same date. Hardly to be distinguished 
in the shadows in some corners of St. Paul's 
Cathedral from which night never quite goes, 
there are certain friendless regimental colours. 
Few of us know now who bore them, and 
where, and why; but imagine the deserved 
fate of one who would allow a brutal word to 
disturb their dust! They mean nothing, ex- 
cept that men, in a world where it is easy to 
lose faith, treasure the few tokens of faithful- 
ness, courage, and enterprise proved in their 
fellows ; and so those old staffs, to which cling 
faded and dusty rags, in a real sense support 

[246] 



An Old Lloyd's Register 

the Cathedral. Poplar once was a parish 
whose name was more familiar in Eastern 
seas' and on the coasts of the Americans, and 
stood for something greater and of more value, 
than the names of some veritable capital cities. 
That vista down the East India Dock Road 
from North Street, past the plane trees which 
support on a cloud the cupola of Green's 
Chapel, to the gateway of the dock which was 
built for John Company, was' what many 
would remember as essential London who 
would pass the Mansion House as though it 
were a dingy and nameless tavern. At the 
back of that road today, and opposite a church 
which was a chapel-of-ease to save the qrews 
of the East Indiamen lying ofif Blackwall the 
long walk to Stebonhythe Church, is the pub- 
lic library; and within that building are 
stored, as are the regimental colours in the 
Cathedral, the houseflags of those very ships 
my Register helps me to remember — the to- 
kens of fidelity and courage, of a service that 
was native, and a skill in that service which 
was traditional to the parish. Tokens that 
now are dusty and in their night, understood 
only by the few who also belong to the past. 
There is the houseflag of the Cutty Sark, 
and her sister ships the Dharwar, Blackadder, 

[247] 



London River 

Coldstream — but one must be careful, and 
refuse to allow these names to carry one away. 
There are so many of them. They are all 
good. Each can conjure up a picture and a 
memory. They are like those names one 
reads in spring in a seed-merchant's cata- 
logue. They call to be written down, to be 
sung aloud, to be shared with a friend. But 
I know the quick jealousy of some old sailor, 
his pride wounded here by an unjustifiable 
omission of the ship that was the one above 
all others for him, is bound to be moved by 
anything less than a complete reprint here 
of the Register. How, for example, could 
I give every name in the fleet of the White 
Star of Aberdeen? Yet was not each ship, 
with her green hull and white spars, as mov- 
ing as a lyric? Is there in London River 
today a ship as beautiful as the old Ther- 
mopylce? There is not. It is impossible. 
There was the Samuel Plimsoll of that line — 
now a coal hulk at Gibraltar — which must be 
named, for she was Captain Simpson's ship 
(he was commodore afterwards), the ''merry 
blue-eyed skipper" of Froude's Oceana, but 
much more than that, a sage and masterful 
Scot whose talk was worth a long journey to 
hear. 

[248] 



An Old Lloyd's Register 

The houseflag of Messrs. R. and H. Green, 
In any reference to the ships of Blackwall, 
should have been mentioned first. There is 
a sense in which it is right to say that the 
founder of that firm, at a time when American 
craft like the Boston clippers of Donald 
McKay were in a fair way to leave the Red 
Ensign far astern, declared that Blackwall 
had to beat those American flyers, and did 
it. But that was long before the eighties, and 
when steam was still ridiculed by those who 
could not see it equalling clippers that had 
logged fourteen knots, or made a day's run 
of over three hundred miles. Yet some of 
Green's ships came down to the end of the era, 
like the Highflyer and the Melbourne. The 
latter was renamed the Macquarie, and was 
one of the last of the clippers to come home 
to Poplar, and for that reason, and because of 
her noble proportions-, her picture is kept, as 
a reminder, by many who wish to think of 
ships and the sea as they were. It is likely 
that most who live in Poplar now, and see next 
to its railway station the curious statue of a 
man and a dog, wonder who on earth Richard 
Green, Esq., used to be; though there are a 
few oldsters left still who remember Black- 
wall when its shipwrights, riggers, sailmakers, 

[249] 



London River 

and caulkers were men of renown and sub- 
stance, and who can recall, not only Richard 
Green, but that dog of his, for it knew the road 
to the dock probably better than most of those 
who use it today. Poplar was the nursery of 
the Clyde. The flags which Poplar knew well 
would puzzle London now — Devitt and 
Moore's, Money Wigram's, Duthie's, Willis's, 
Carmichael's, Duncan Dunbar's, Scrutton's, 
and Elder's. But when lately our merchant 
seamen surprised us with a mastery of their 
craft and a fortitude which most of us had 
forgotten were ever ours, what those flags rep- 
resented, a regard for a tradition as ancient 
and as rigorous as that of any royal port, was 
beneath it all. 

But if it were asked what was this tradi- 
tion, it would not be easy to say. Its author- 
ity is voiceless, but it is understood. Then 
what is it one knows of it? I remember, on a 
day just before the War, the flood beginning 
to move the shipping of the Pool. Eastward 
the black cliffs lowered till they sank under 
the white tower of Limehouse Church; and 
the church, looking to the sunset, seemed 
baseless, shining with a lunar radiance. Up- 
river, the small craft were uncertain, moving 
like phantoms over a pit of bottomless fire. 

[250] 



An Old Lloyd's Register 

But downstream every ship was as salient as 
though lighted with the rays of a great lan- 
tern. And there in that light was a laden 
barque, outward bound, waiting at the buoys. 
She headed downstream. Her row of white 
ports diminished along the length of her green 
hull. The lines of her bulwarks, her sheer, 
fell to her waist, then airily rose again, came 
up and round to merge in one fine line at the 
jibboom. The lines sweeping down and air- 
ily rising again were light as the swoop of a 
swallow. The symmetry of her laden hull 
set in a plane of dancing sun-points, and her 
soaring amber masts, cross-sparred, caught in 
a mesh of delicate cordage, and shining ,till 
they almost vanished where they rose above 
the buildings and stood against the sky, made 
her seem as noble and haughty as a burst of 
great music. One of ours, that ship. Part of 
our parish. 



THE END 



[251] 



Also by H. M. Tomlinson 

OLD JUNK 

With a foreword by S. K. Ratcliff 

A BOOK of pictures of sea and land, of travel along 
the African Coast and the cities of the Mediter- 
ranean, of unknown skies and unsung waters, — 
then of New York, England and France in war time. 

"He habitually pictures the earth and its changing gar- 
ments of storm and sunshine in a prose that has no par- 
allel except in the prose of Conrad. There are certain 
dramatic events of the weather, certain moving episodes 
of scenery, the beauty of which are almost incommunicable 
by art ... of things like these which have a power to 
evoke human emotions which is mysteriously greater than 
their relevance to human affairs, only Conrad and Mr. 
Tomlinson can give an adequate rendering." — The Neiv 
Republic. 

$2.50 net at all booksellers, 
or from the publisher 

ALFRED A. KNOPF NEW YORK 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper proce 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: July 2009 

PreservationTechnologie 

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